( (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought) ) Hans Blumenberg - Work On Myth-The MIT Press (1988) PDF

Work on Myth
Hans Blumenberg
translated by Robert M. Wallace
The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought
Thomas McCarthy, general editor
Theodor W. Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms
Karl-Otto Apel, Understanding and Explanation: A Transcendental-Pragmatic Perspective
Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy if the Modern Age
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth
Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development if Critical Theory
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age if Science
Jiirgen Habermas, Philosophical-Political Profiles
Jiirgen Habennas, editor, Observations on ~The Spiritual Situation if the Age"
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics if Historical Time
Claus Offe, Contradictions if the Welfare State
Helmut Peukert, Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology if
Communicative Action
Joachim Ritter, Hegel and the French Revolution: Essays on the Philosophy if Right
Alfred Schmidt, History and Structure: An Essay on Hegelian-Marxist and Structuralist
Theories of History
Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology if Husserl, Heidegger,
Sartre, and Buber
Work on Myth
This translation copyright © 1985 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This work
originally appeared in Gennan as Arbeit am Mythos, © 1979 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt
am Main, Federal Republic of Germany.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means {including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval} without pennission in writing from the publisher.
Publication of this volume has been aided by a grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities.
This book was set in Baskerville by The MIT Press Computergraphics Department
and printed and bound by Halliday Lithograph in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Blumenberg, Hans.
Work on myth.
{Studies in contemporary Gennan social thought}

Translation of: Arbeit am Mythos.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. History-Philosophy. 2. Civilization-Philosophy.
3. Myth. I. Title. II. Series.
DI6.8.B63131985 901 85-118
ISBN 0-262-02215-X
Contents
Translator's Introduction
..
Vll
Part I
Archaic Division of Powers
1 After the Absolutism of Reality 3
2 The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed 34
3 'Significance' 59
4 Procedural Regulations 113
Part II
Stories Become History
1 The Distortion of Temporal Perspective 149
2 Fundamental Myths and Art Myths 174
3 Myths and Dogmas 215
4 To Bring Myth to an End 263
Part III
The Theft of Fire Ceases to Be Sacrilege
1 The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of 299

the Reception
2 Sophists and Cynics: Antithetical Aspects' of the 328
Prometheus Material
3 Return from Existential Groundlessness 350
4 Aesthetic Brightening Up 377
Part IV
Against a God, Only a God
Introduction 399
1 "Priming Powder for an Explosion" 403
2 A Conflict between Gods 430
3 Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus 465
4 Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying" 523
Part V
The Titan in His Century
1 Passage through the Philosophy of History 561
2 On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again 595
3 To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One 627

Myth
Notes 639
Name Index 679

1. Our Antithetical Attitudes to Myth
In Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg addresses a question that has

bothered European thinkers since at least the late seventeenth century,
namely, why, with the triumphant advance of secular, scientific ra-
tionality, have the old myths not simply evaporated into thin air?rt
How is it that they have maintained and even increased their hold
on (at least) our literary imaginations?The Enlightenment in general
followed Descartes in categorizing myths among the "prejudices" that
had to ~be swept away in order to make room for the methodical
development and application of scientific knowledge. Romanticism,
particularly in Germany, reacted against this jettisoning of tradition,
and against the unsatisfYing incompleteness and tentativeness of science,
by calling either for a "new mythology" or (more often) for a return
to our old, inherited myths. An appreciation and employment of
mythical themes, which could (with some effort) be interpreted as
indicating the possible return of an encompassing mythical world view,
had in fact been evident even in the midst of the "scientific revolution"
of the seventeenth century-witness writers like Racine and Milton-
and this has continued right into the twentieth century, with Joyce,
Valery, Kafka, Thomas Mann, and many others. But theorists are still
not sure what to make of it. Our usual interpretations of science,
whether rationalist, empiricist, positivist, or vvhatever, are all still very
much in the Enlightenment tradition, and ilnply a role for Inyth in
the modem age which is restricted exclusively to the aesthetic ilnagi-
Vlll
nation and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of

scientific rationality in our serious, practical lives. On the other hand,
those who concern themselves extensively with myth, such as literary
scholars, anthropologists, and psychologists, often tend toward the
other, Romantic extreme-interpreting myth's modem survival as
evidence of its being, in one way or another, inherent in human nature
and even, given its seemingly greater antiquity and ubiquity, of its
being more fundamental to human nature than our ("surface")
rationality.
Blumenberg undertakes precisely to overcome this antithesis, to
extract the truth from the Enlightenment and from Romanticism by
showing that scientific rationality and ongoing "work" on our inherited
myths are not only not incompatible but are both indispensable aspects
of the comprehensive effort that makes human existence possible.
2. A Non-Romantic Alternative to the Enlightenment's

Conception of the Relation between Rationality and Myth:
The Overcoming of the Absolutism of Reality
The last German philosopher to address these questions at length was

Ernst Cassirer. b Cassirer was a leading heir of Kant, whose philosophy
can be seen as the culmination (in the realm of theory) of the Enlight-
enment; but Cassirer's wide reading in the Romantic writers and in
ethnology, his reading of Freud, and finally his agonizing observation
of the role played by "myths" (of the "Fuhrer" and the "master race,"
for example) in Nazism led him to treat the subject more seriously
and more systematically than any philosopher had done before him.
With his theory of "symbolic forms," he tried to do justice to myth's
internal coherence and power by giving it a status equal to that of
knowledge, language, art, and religion, as a fundamental human activity
and construction that could not be dismissed (in the eighteenth-century
manner) as mere fable, mental cobwebs, or "prejudice."
While Blumenberg honors Cassirer's work on this problem (as on
others), c he has one fundamental criticism of Cassirer's theory: That
he did not manage to overcome the unstated assumption that once
science emerges, myth, despite its supposedly autonomous dignity as
a "symbolic form," is fundamentally obsolete; that once the step "from
mythos to logos" has been taken, it can only be perverse to, as it
were, tum back. If the relation of myth to science is conceived in this
IX
way-as it probably is by most of us who are neither programmatic

Romantics nor specialized students of myth-then (a) the "primitive"
people for whom myth is still a living reality have to be seen as being
largely, if not entirely, deprived of an essential symbolic form (logos,
or science), one that is preferable to the distinctive one that they do
enjoy; (b) the mythical patterns that Freud discovered in the unconscious
are, at most, relics of a (personal and perhaps historical) childhood
that we have left behind us; (c) the role of myth in modem literature
is, at most, that of an object of aesthetic experience, having no bearing
on the practical business of life; and (d) Nazism's relation to myth is
that of an incomprehensible reversion, the reversion before which
Cassirer, in The Myth of the State, stood aghast.
Is this the only rational way to interpret these phenomena? Is there
any alternative to Cassirer's Enlightenment schema of the replacement
of myth by science, other than a Romantic synthesis of the two, which
would amount to a denial of the autonomy of science as a "symbolic
form" (thus casting doubt on the Romantics' commitment to ration-
ality)? Blumenberg proposes that instead of always interpreting myth
in terms of what it (supposedly) came before-its terminus ad quem,
science, the arrival of which appears to make it obsolete-we should
try interpreting it in terms of its terminus a quo, its point of departure.
That point of departure is the problem that myth seeks to solve, which
is the source of its real (and lasting) importance, regardless of what
(if anything) comes 'after' it.-::-
What is that problem? Blumenberg calls it the "absolutism of reality."
This phrase designates a situation in which "man comes close to not
having control of the conditions of his existence and, what is more
important, believes that he simply lacks control of them. "<I This is to
be understood as a "limit concept," which, while it may never have
been fully realized, is a necessary extrapolation, a "limiting case" that
makes sense of what we do observe in myth and in the rest of human
history. In particular, it is consistent, Blumenberg says, with cun-ent
theories of the origin of man - of what happened when our ancestors
adopted an upright, bipedal posture; were displaced from the sheltering
·::Throughout this book, single quotation marks have been lIsed exclusively as 'scare quotes,'
to draw attention to special uses of terms or to emphasize (as ill this case) the problematic
status, in the discussion, of the concepts referred to by the words in question. The only
exception to this mle is a quotation within a quotation (i.e., within a set of double quotes),
which requires single quotation marks for contrast.
x
forest into the open savanna; and found that their instincts did not
tell them how to cope with this new situation. Blumenberg argues
that the dramatically enlarged horizon of what they could perceive
(and within which they could be perceived) would be, for them, a
situation of great ambiguity, one in which some of their central in-
stincts-such as fleeing from immediate danger, an instinct that had
served to clarify many situations for them in the forest-would be of
little help. Our ancestors "came close to not having control of the
conditions of their existence" because they had become - as we re-
main - a species without a clearly defined biological niche. If this
situation was not dealt with in some radically new way-that is, if the
"limiting case" of the absolutism of reality was realized (or if we
thought it was realized) for any length of time - it would produce the
mental state that Blumenberg calls Angst, which is normally translated
as "anxiety" but would be better rendered by the psychiatrist's para-
phrase, "intense fear or dread lacking an unambiguous cause or a
specific threat"; and the resulting behavior would be panic, paralysis,
or both.
Thus the "absolutism of reality" is a fundamental threat, implicit
in our biological nature and its relation to our natural environment,
to our capacity for survival. Our response to this challenge has been
the development of culture-of, essentially, the same "symbolic forms"
that Cassirer described. But where Cassirer saw those "symbolic forms"
as a spontaneous expression of man's (apparently "given," unprob-
lematic) "nature" as the "animal symbolicum," Blumenberg sees them
as a solution to a problem that is inherent in man's biological nature.
Man, as it were, makes himself an animal symbolicum in order to make
up for his lack of biologically adaptive instincts: his "nature" (in Cas-
sirer's sense) is in fact his solution to the life-threatening problem
posed for him by his biological nature.
What precisely is the role of myth in relation to this problem? It
is to overcome (or perhaps to forestall) the Angst that the problem
produces (or could produce), by "rationalizing" it into plain fear of
specific, named agencies, more or less personalized powers, whom we
can address and (to that extent) deal with. It is important that these
powers, which are often theriomorphic in the early stages, are plural,
so that each has only a limited domain- there is a "separation of
powers" among them, so that none of them can present the kind of
all-encompassing threat that Angst portends. The other important fact
Xl
is that they were more horrible, and less predictable, "in the beginning."
The succession of generations on Olympus-Zeus the lawgiver sup-
planting the lawless Titans, and so on-illustrates this fact (as do the
accomplishments of heroes like Perseus and Hercules). But, again, the
continuing polytheistic "separation of powers" prevents the new "su-
preme god" from causing a relapse into Angst. "The consolidation of
the state that the world has arrived at, as a 'cosmos,' and the restriction
of every absolutism that arises in this process are interwoven as anti-
the tical motives in myth.... Zeus had not been able to conquer without
assistance either the Titans or the giants whose bodies were partly
snakes; and every assistance means a sort of constitutionalization of
his power. "e
Blumenberg devotes several chapters to an examination of the ways
in which myth serves to reduce the absolutism of reality, creating a
"breathing space" in which men can also deal with the practical side
of the challenge of survival by (among other things) cultivating the
rational comprehension and control of specific natural phenomena-
in which we have made so much progress in the last few centuries.
But such comprehension and control cannot take the place of-cannot
perform the function of- the old stories. Knowledge is always only
partial; the absolutism of reality was (or is, or would be) total, and
requires something other than knowledge alone to overcome it, to
put it behind us. And if someone were to say that it is "no longer a
problem" for us - that is, that our lack of a biological niche, our deficit
of instinct, is no longer a problem for us (so that we no longer have
any need of myth)- this would amount to the assertion that we are
definitively free of our biological origins, which is a proposition that
we can hardly expect to be able to demonstrate.
This account of the function of myth is not only persuasive in itself,
as Blumenberg expounds and illustrates it, but also has the crucial
advantage over the schema of the step forward "from mythos to logos"
that it does not assume the operation of an overall goal in the history
of human consciousness - the end state of the scientific rationality that
we now enjoy. Instead of such a teleology, which has only escaped
the Griticism of the modem empiricist and positivist critics of teleology
(as it escapes Cassirer's) because it is buried so deeply in their OVln
thinking, Blumenberg proposes an interpretation of human "sYlnbolic
forms" as factors that all contribute, simultaneously, to the single
cornprehensive endeavor of making human existence possible by
..
XII
overcoming the problem of our biological nonadaption, our consti-

tutional deficit of instinct. The only goal that is operative in this process
is that of overcoming the immediate, all-encompassing problem-and
that is an endeavor to which man addresses himself in every possible
way at once.
In addition to this 'methodological' advantage, Blumenberg's account
yields a more balanced view of each of the specific problem areas-
namely, "primitive" cultures, psychoanalysis, literature, and Nazism-
that I listed above in summarizing Cassirer. (a) In connection with the
relation between "primitive" and modem cultures, it corrects the
ethnocentric implication of the "from mythos to logos" schema that
there was a stage in the development of human consciousness in which
rationality was largely absent (a "prelogical mentality," as Lucien Levy-
Bruhl called it). Rationality and myth are both indispensable to human
survival, from the start. (Presumably this need not prevent the balance
between our respective needs for them from shifting, to the extent
that, through experience and knowledge, we achieve a command of
reality that makes its possible "absolutism" a less pressing concern.
On the other hand, it is also possible that experience of inherent limits
to such a command could intensify the relevance of Angst once more.)
(b) As in the history of the species, so also in the development of
individuals there is probably no point of demarcation at which ra-
tionality takes over (or should take over) completely from more 'child-
ish,' 'prerational' modes of thought involving, for example, fantasy.
"Flight behind an image"-a phrase used by Goethe to describe one
of his own characteristic procedures, which Blumenberg examines in
detail in part IV of this book-may be a necessary recourse at any
age in the face of issues that rationality cannot yet, or perhaps can
never, handle. An example of the latter may be the issue of self-
knowledge and identity, in which the element of-irreducibly "brute"-
inheritance may be, for the individual, an "absolute reality" in the
sense that a conceptual grasp of it does not even potentially enable
him to change it. In this case, it may be that the quasi-mythical patterns
that Freud found in dreams and elsewhere can partake of the same
functional legitimacy as Goethe's "images," though this does not entail
regarding them as eternal, cosmic 'givens' in the manner of, for ex-
ample, Jung. Nor does it mean that the functioning of the images
must be (or even can be) naive and unreflected. As Blumenberg says,
we only know myth in and through our "work on" it- an expression
Xlll
that intentionally avoids distinguishing between imaginative and con-

ceptual-analytical "work." Blumenberg argues that right from the
beginning of our recorded tradition, our dealings with myth have been
self-conscious, 'commenting on' it (as in Homer's ironical humor about
the gods) as well as handing it on. But this need not prevent its images
from functioning in our lives, in circumstances where nothing else will
serve. (c) What I have just been saying makes it clear that, from
Blumenberg's perspective, the literary treatment of myth cannot be
segregated as a 'merely aesthetic' matter with no bearing on the
practical business of life. Neither, on the other hand, will literature
derive all of its punch from a 'given' stock of mythical images that it
receives from preliterate strata of consciousness or history, and merely
repackages. Some of the interesting active relations between myth and
literature that become possible in this new perspective are outlined
in sections 6 and 7, below. (d) Finally, if myth does not 'precede' (and
is not rendered obsolete by) rationality, then the Nazis' apparent use
of myth ceases to be the great inexplicable reversion that it seemed
to Cassirer, though again it need not be a simple continuation, either.
(This can hardly be the type of myth that is indispensable to human
survival.) In this type of case especially, if myth does not 'belong to'
a past epoch, it is all the more important to define and understand
what real myth is, and to distinguish it from other nonrational phe-
nomena, including dogma, ideology, and pseudomyths.
Let us return to the fundamental schema. It should not be assumed
that Blumenberg's critique of the notion of the historical passage "from
mythos to logos" means that there are no important developments
in human consciousness that can be localized as subsequent to 'the
beginnings.' There are, literally, "epoch-making" developments, such
as the emergence of the category of dogma, in the course of the
development of monotheistic religion, or the emergence of modem
"human self-assertion," as Blumenberg calls it, with its concepts of
the self, matter, method, and progress. (The former is examined in
part II, chapter 1, of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and in part II,
chapters 2 and 3, of the present book; the later is the main subject
of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.) But an epoch is not a 'stage' on
the way to another one, or a goal toward which previous epochs \vcre
directed, the attainment of which makes them 'obsolete.' There is no
ladder of epochs (each perhaps with a corresponding "sYlnbolic fonn")
such as philosophers of history since the eighteenth century have
XIV
wanted to establish. And this applies equally to the 'superepochs' of

myth and logos that have been, as it were, the last recourse of teleo-
logical philosophy of history. The unity of human history is not that
of a teleological sequence but that of the working through of solutions
to one original all-encompassing problem, the problem of the "ab-
solutism of reality." The solutions-the "symbolic forms"-are not
ultimately identical with one another (as Romantics would like myth
and rationality, poetry and physics, to be), but neither are they in
competition with one another. They perform different, equally essential
functions in dealing "vith man's fundamental problem.
3. The Philosophical Anthropology Underlying Blumenberg's

Alternative to the Enlightenment Conception
Before proceeding to Blumenberg's alternative to the (broadly) Ro-

mantic conception of the nature and process of myth itself, I want to
examine from another point of view the "philosophical anthropology"
that I outlined in the previous section, and to relate it to the basic
concepts of The Legitimacy oj the Modern Age.
Readers will be struck, on the first page of Work on Myth, by Blu-
menberg's comparison of his idea of the "absolutism of reality" to
"the old status naturalis of philosophical theories of culture and the
state." He does not elaborate on the comparison in this book, but in
a paper entitled "Anthropology's Approach to Rhetoric's Orientation
to Action," first published in 19 7 1, he provides relevant detail on the
subject and at the same time illuminates the difference between his
and Cassirer's concepts of "nature." Blumenberg is criticizing Cassirer
for not trying to explain why the "symbolic forms" are posited, leaving
us to assume instead that man, as the animal symbolicum, simply ex-
presses his 'nature' in them, as his (apparently) 'free' creations. "But,"
Blumenberg objects,
to the extent that philosophy is a process of dismantling things that

are taken for granted, a 'philosophical' anthropology has to address
the question whether man's physical existence is not itself a result
that follows from the accomplishments that are ascribed to him as
belonging to his 'nature.' The first proposition of a philosophical an-
thropology would then be: It cannot be taken for granted that man
is able to exist. The prototype for such a line of thought can be found
in the modem theory of the social contract that deduces the necessity
xv
of establishing man's 'civil' [biirgerlich: i.e., political as opposed to natural]

condition from its finding that his 'natural' condition contradicts the
conditions of the possibility of physical existence. For Hobbes the state
is the first artifact, which does not enrich (in the direction of a 'world
of culture') the environment in which man lives, but rather eliminates
its lethal antagonism [the "war of all against all"]. The philosophical
significance of this theory is not primarily that it explains the appearance
of an institution like the state (still less that it explains the appearance
of the absolutist state), but rather that it converts the supposed definition
of man's nature as that of a zoon politikon ["political animal"-Aristotle]
into a functional description. I see no other scientific course for an
anthropology except, in an analogous manner, to destroy [or "de-
construct": destruieren] what is supposedly 'natural' and convict it of
its 'artificiality' in the functional system of the elementary human
accomplishment called 'life. 'f
Evidently, then, the status naturalis to which Blurnenberg compares

the "absolutism of reality" is not primarily Locke's or Rousseau's
"state of nature," for example, but rather Hobbes's-a condition that,
while it is 'natural' in the sense of being animal-like ("brutish," as
Hobbes put it), contradicts man's natural desire for survival, so that-
like the "absolutism of reality" - it cannot last. But, fleeting though it
is (or was, or would have been), it is this state that explains Hobbesian
man's willingness to enter the "contract" that creates a sovereign who
will (supposedly) ensure his survival. Similarly, Blumenbergian man
creates his "symbolic forms" in order to overcome his equally self-
contradictory natural state as a creature lacking the instincts to fit it
into a "niche" in nature of the kind that every other (surviving) creature
has. And while these symbolic forms are 'natural' in the sense that
they are (or are supposed to be) common to all men whom we will
ever encounter, so that we habitually think of them as aspects of
'human nature,' they are 'artificial' in the more fundamental sense
that we can only understand why they exist by interpreting them, not
as 'givens,' but as solutions to an antecedent problem and by inter-
preting human life, not as a result of a good fit between man's instincts
and his environment, but rather as the evidence of an accomplish-
ment-as far as we know, a unique accomplishment-that sets man
apart from other species.
Thus man's uniqueness is not in something that he is (in his "essence"
or nature, as, for example, the zoon politikon or the animal symbolicum)
XVI
but in what he does in order to deal with the problem of what he is-
in order to make himself biologically viable. In this case, as Blumenberg
says, it makes sense to try to interpret each of man's characteristic
expressions in terms of its contribution to-its "function" within-
this comprehensive undertaking. And Blumenberg does so with myth,
with (as it seems to me) striking results, in this book.
To assess this philosophical anthropology as thoroughly as it
deserves-in relation to the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in which
Cassirer's philosophy of man still stands; to the modern social contract
thinkers, a tradition with which it has sharp differences as well as
similarities (Hobbes, for example had no use for myth, except perhaps
as a source of allegorical illustrations of rational truths); to the tortures
of modern thought about man induced by modern science and epis-
temology, since Descartes; and to other recent efforts to deal with
these matters g - would take much more space than I have here. What
I do want to do, before going on to myth itself, is to comment briefly
on the relation between this model and the central ideas of Blumen-
berg's Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
The concept that links the two books at the most fundamental level
is that of function. We can appreciate how central this concept is to
the explanatory accomplishment of the model of the "absolutism of
reality" by zeroing in more closely on just what that explanatory
accomplishment is.
Blumenberg (like the social contract thinkers before him) repeatedly
expresses skepticism about the possibility of ever knowing how his
subject (here, myths; there, the state, or society) in fact originated-
"Here the rule is: Ignorabimus [We will not knoW]."h He mentions many
of the popular theories of the origin of myths (the astronomical school;
the ritual or history-of-religion approach; Freud's and Jung's psy-
choanalytical theories) and discusses some of them (Freud's, in par-
ticular) at considerable length, but in each case he makes it clear that
his interest is primarily in the attitude of the theoretician in question
(as an instance of a type of "work on myth"), and that he doubts
whether any rationally defensible decision between the alternative
theories will ever be possible. As the text on the dust jacket of the
original German edition (which, by its style, is clearly the work of the
author) says, "The book proceeds froIn the cautious assumption that
one may learn to see more if one leaves the great questions alone,
without disdaining them. For that reason, the problem of the origin
..
XVll
of myths-which has been the subject of many futile efforts-is brack-

eted out, as is their association with the unconscious (as a disguised
form of the old 'innate ideas')."
But isn't the model of myth as a means of overcoming the "ab-
solutism of reality" a theory of the origin of myth? How can Blumenberg
claim that he is bracketing out this question when he devotes his first
chapter to a dramatically new answer to it? Obviously, in a sense the
"absolutism of reality" model is such an answer, but not in the same
wa y as the other theories we are familiar with. Those theories are, in
general, mutually incompatible. Myths that reflect the dynamics of
our internal psychic organization, or our childhood traumas, cannot
at the same time embody an analysis of astronomical and calendrical
regularities, or reflect a combination of rituals stemming from cults
that were superimposed on one another as a result of some long-
forgotten conquest. Sources of these kinds are simply too heterogeneous
to be compatible as explanations of the same myths. But none of
them is necessarily incompatible with the "absolutism of reality" model.
This model says nothing about the source of the contents of myths;
it only says that their ultimate Junction, wherever their contents may
come from, is to put behind us the A ngst that would be inspired by
an overpowering reality. You might say that it is a theory of the origin
of myth (in the singular), rather than of myths (in the plural). It describes
the one vital accomplishment of all myths, as opposed to the possible
additional specific accomplishments of individual myths. What is re-
markable, though, is how the very specific quality of each of the many
individual myths that Blumenberg discusses in the book- from Medusa
through Abraham and Isaac to Faust- seems to be illuminated by this
'functional' approach in a way that few of them have been by the
popular theories of 'the origins.' It seems that when one looks for the
ultimate human function of myth, one may indeed "see more" than
when one merely sees myth as a reflection of other realities in and
around man.
In any case, it is interesting to observe that this distinction bet\veen
content (or "substance") and function is also a key one in Blumenberg's
Legitimacy of the Modern Age. i A central problem in that book was to
explain how innocent modem ideas like that of cooperative human
progress could have been inflated into iITational conceptions like that
of an inevitable progress supposedly present in history as a \vhole. To
explain processes of this sort, Blumenberg hypothesized a structure
XVlll
Translator's In trod uction
of formally identical "positions" in human consciousness, a structure

that endures through changes of epoch (though not necessarily forever)
and that we feel compelled to fill (to "reoccupy' ') with whatever content
is available in a new epoch) In the case of "progress," the "position"
established by the story of God's dealings with the world (from Creation
to Last Judgment)-the position of a knowledge of the pattern of
history as a whole - was "reoccupied," Blumenberg argued, by the
new idea of progress, with the result that that idea was distorted,
almost beyond recognition, in the way we are familiar with from the
famous philosophies of history. Contrary to the "secularization" theory,
which saw in those philosophies a constant "substance" (namely, es-
chatology) in "secularized" form, Blumenberg saw a legitimate new
idea being forced into a constant, inherited function. And he applied
this model of functional "positions" to many other phenomena as
well, in the transition from the ancient to the medieval as well as from
the medieval to the modern epoch.
The fundamental category of explanation has thus remained the
same, but its application in the new book yields a distinctly different
picture from the one that we know from the first book. In the case
of myth, unlike that of 'progress,' for example, it appears that its
function may be not only a neglected and illuminating aspect but also
the only knowable aspect that it possesses for us - to the extent that
the great diversity of (and the contradictions between) the accounts
of the derivation of its "substance" that have been proposed inclines
us toward the skepticism about such accounts that Blumenberg ad-
vocates. Consequently, myth cannot appear, as in the earlier model,
as a distorted form of something else that has been forced to perform
a function that does not authentically belong to it. There can be no
implication, such as seemed clearly present in The Legitimacy if the
Modern Age, that by distinguishing the authentic content from the
superimposed function we can clarify the real commitments of an age
(whether our own or a previous one). Myth's function is its 'true reality,'
or as near as we can ever expect to get to such a reality.
Nor is it only that myth originates in preliterate, undocumented
times, into which we can only extrapolate backward in the manner
of the social contract theorists, that prevents us from distinguishing
its 'reality' from its function. If Blumenberg is right to abandon the
idea of an epoch-making step forward "from mythos to logos," then
myths differ from the phenomena that he analyzed in The Legitimacy
XIX
of the Modern Age by not "belonging to" an epoch at all: by being, as

it were, underlying "constants" in our entire tradition. This is possible
because the function of myth relates not to a framework of mental
"positions," which expands (and sometimes contracts) in the course
of history, but to a single, all-encompassing human achievement-
the "elementary human accomplishment" of life. This new philo-
sophical anthropology puts the epochs of our tradition into an entirely
new perspective, which contrasts sharply with the earlier book's more
narrowly focused "historicism," with its scrupulous attention to each
epoch's independent claims and premises and its abstention from
broad, "metaphysical" categories. Not that that scrupulous attention
is missing here: None of the distinctions drawn in the earlier book
has been obscured, and much fine detail has been added. But the
model of life as the elementary human accomplishment and the func-
tional explanation of all of man's "symbolic forms" subsumes the
earlier model of the structure of "positions" so decisively, and unifies
the phenomena of human history and consciousness so radically, that
it requires an effort to remember that we are still, fundamentally, in
the realm of empirical historical-hermeneutic science here, rather than
metaphysics. A thorough analysis of the relation between the basic
ideas of the two books would be a fascinating and a rewarding project,
but is more than I can attempt here.
4. A Non-"Enlightenment" Alternative to the Romantic

Conception of Myth: The "Darwinism of Words"
After thus providing an alternative to our dominant, 'Enlightenment"

conception of the relation between myth and scientific rationality,
Blumenberg presents a theory that provides an alternative to our
dominant conception of the nature and process of myth itself The
Enlightenment and those who adhere to its attitudes generally do not
take myth seriously enough to attempt a theory of it, so it turns out
that many (if not all) of the prominent theories of myth have (whether
consciously or not) a good deal in common with Romanticism. German
Romantic theoreticians like Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel, \vho \vere
impressed by the survival of the Greek, Hindu, Norse, and Celtic
rnyths - despite the introduction, in the meantime, of writing, rTIono-
theistic religion, and 'enlightenment'-and by the apparent ubiquity
of myth in the world's cultures, saw myth as a kind of prilneval,
xx
"original" endowment of, if not a revelation granted to, mankind.

The modem disciplines that study myth, including literary studies,
anthropology, and psychology, may not use such suggestive language,
but they do rely on a similar fundamental schema when they study
the way a given "stock" of myths is "used" in literature; or the way
certain universal "structures " may underlie the diversity of myths in
different cultures; or the way certain universal experiences in the
childhood of the individual or of mankind function in the unconscious
and consequently in myth-in every case assuming that the "preg-
nance" (in the Gestalt psychologists' sense),k the sharp definition and
the compelling power of the mythical motif, is fully present from the
beginning, that myth itself has no history. In contrast to this, Blu-
menberg reminds us that the mature mythology that we know from
Homer, Hesiod, the Ramayana, from our informants in "primitive"
cultures, and so on, must be imagined as the product of thousands
of years of oral storytelling, in the course of which vastly greater
quantities of stories, figures, and variations on earlier stories and figures
were tested on audiences upon whose active approval the storyteller's
success, perhaps even his livelihood, depended - and that as a result
of such "testing" most of these were discarded as not having the
impact that the surviving material has. In other words, the stock of
myth that has come down to us is the product, not of a reverent
process of handing down (such as comes into play with written texts,
and above all with Scriptures), but rather of an unsparing process of
"natural selection," which Blumenberg in fact entitles the "Darwinism
of words." In this process the compelling power of mythical material
was brought out, was "optimized," by the combined "work" (productive
and destructive) of storytellers and their audiences. And it is this process,
rather than any innate and original human endowment, that explains
the 'pregnance' and the durability of what has survived it. Like evo-
lution, the genesis of myths is not something that we can observe
directly; in fact, the epistemological situation is even \vorse with them,
in that we have no 'fossils' illustrating stages in that genesis. But, also
as in evolution, if we allow this difficulty to prevent us from constructing
a hypothetical mechanism, we will be left with either total ignorance
or an assumption of simultaneous creation or (essentially Platonic)
preformation. "Selection" is the only theory that gives the under-
standing a handle on an actual process, hypothetical though it will no
doubt always remain.
XXI
It is certainly a novel idea as applied to myth. Scholars who study

myth in oral cultures have not speculated much on any diachronic
process by which its patterns may have developed. They have, of
course, initially been concerned with the 'simultaneous' array of myths,
which is what the evidence confronts them with directly; and their
well-known genetic hypotheses have all been in terms of extramythical
realities (astronomical, psychological, ritual, or whatever) thought to
be 'reflected' in this array. Rather than a process of development,
then, takillg place over time, their theories have presented an essentially
static picture - consistent, as I said, with the basic Romantic schema
according to which each myth is assumed always to have had the
'pregnance' that it exhibits now. Those scholars, on the other hand,
such as Milman Parry and A. B. Lord, who have studied the mechanisms
by which "oral literature" is made transmissible-which must ulti-
mately have a great deal to do with the process of increasing 'preg-
nance,' through the interaction of "singers" and audiences, that
Blumenberg hypothesizes-have in fact been more struck by the sheer
survival of an oral epic, as such, than by the question of how its
contents reached the level of power and memorability that they exhibit
when they reach us; so that again their models have been essentially
static, rather than dynamic.
Nor is there a close relationship between Blumenberg's "Darwinism
of words" and previous applications or the idea of evolution within
the sphere of human history. Unlike the "social Darwinism" of Darwin's
Descent of Man and other turn-of-the-century writings, the "Darwinism
of words" does not describe the survival or "selection" of human
individuals or populations. And more recent attempts to discern an
evolutionary process among social systems l do not often get into clear
focus the relation between the operation of evolution on physical
bodies and its operation on cultural constructs, as Blumenberg does
in the following formulation (which also explains why "social Dar-
winism" does not describe man"s experience as a whole):
The organic system resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes

'man' by evading the pressure of that mechanism, which it does by
setting against it something like a phantom body. This is the sphere
of his culture, his institutions - and also his myths .... The conditions
of selection no longer reach and have an effect upon man as a physical
system to the extent that he has learned to subject his artifacts and in5trurnent5,
·.
XXll
instead of himself to the process of adaptation . . '.' It is to these, rather than

to their producer, that the 'survival of the fittest' applies. m
This striking point ties in neatly with Blumenberg's philosophical an-

thropology, where culture appeared as man's unique solution to his
biological predicament of lacking instincts to fit him into an ecological
niche. Now we see that this "solution" protects us-again uniquely-
from the operation of the normal biological process of selection, by
undergoing a similar process in our stead.
From the same passage from which I have just been quoting, we
learn that "theory and technology" are among the cultural phenomena
that are subjected to this process of selection. It is probably most
obvious in this case how such selection can serve - via the development
of the "forces of production" and of capacities for prediction and
prevention-to protect human beings from the direct operation of
Darwinian selection on themselves. Blumenberg asserts, in fact-while
making the necessary reservations about "inconsistencies in the system
of the objectifications produced by selection ... which impair the overall
result" - that "by this criterion there has been and there is objective
progress .... History, whatever else it may be, is also a process of
optimization. "n And this "objective progress" occurs not only in theory
(i.e., in science) and in technology, or in them and, by an odd com-
bination, in myth as well, but also in the whole sphere of "modes of
behavior and thought structures" that Blumenberg summarizes under
the term institutions.
The term institution is used here in the special sense given it by the
recently deceased German philosopher-anthropologist Arnold Gehlen.o
It designates a mode of behavior or thought structure that has not
been rationally or purposefully constructed (as "institutions," in one
common sense, are thought of as being or having been), but rather
is simply inherited and taken for granted, without any explicit justi-
fication, as "the way we do things" or the way we think. (One major
sense of the Latin root, institutio "custom," expresses this idea.) Blu-
menberg contrasts the rich variety of 'institutions' - social, cultural,
and nlythical-that have been produced by millenniums of "selection"
with the (comparatively, at least) unfulfilled promises of Romanticism's
fa vorite agency of production: the imagination.
When it was announced from the walls during May 1968 in Paris that
the imagination should and now would come to power, it was ilTI-
XXlll
mediately clear to the late grandchildren of aesthetic Idealism that

this guaranteed that everything would become different and thus better.
No one thought they needed to ask-no one would have been permitted
to ask-what the imagination had to offer, what it had ever offered.
We can confidently invert Baudelaire's statement that the imagination
created the world, asserting that it could never have accomplished
it.... The example of the literary genre of 'utopia,' with its (reluctantly
admitted) poverty, demonstrates what the imagination's capacity to
pursue and break through the opening created by negation really
amounts to .... No imagination could have invented what ethnology
and cultural anthropology have collected in the way of regulations of
existence, world interpretations, forms of life, classifications, ornaments,
and insignia. All of this is the product of a process of selection that
has been at work for a long time. . . . The Neptunism of selection
always has a head start, in relation to the Vulcanism that Idealist
aesthetics expects of the imagination, as a result of having shaped the
latter's elementary possibilities. P
This critique of the claims made for the human imagination by a

certain kind of radicalism is a valuable complement to Blumenberg's
earlier criticism of the idea of myth as an original human endowment
or revelation. For, despite the apparent conflict between the two ideas
as possible explanations of myth (original 'revelation' versus original
'poetry'), they are in fact both cornerstones of Romanticism, which
probably secretly hopes, by uniting them, to unite myth with poetry,
the 'origins' with the present, and 'reality' with the imagination-thus
overcoming the aggravating contingency of our experience of history.
By providing an alternative account of the phenomena of myth and
art, of the durability of inherited cultures, and of cultural diversity,
that give each of these key Romantic ideas their plausibility, the "Dar-
winism of words" helps to overcome, from the Romantic side, the
Enlightenment-versus-Romantic antinomy of attitudes that is so per-
vasive in our thinking-just as the "absolutism of reality" model helps
to overcome it from the side of the Enlightenment.
5. Why This Theory Is Not Obscurantist or Antirational
One may nevertheless wonder whether, despite the "objective prog-

ress" that he credits it with producing, Blumenberg's "Darwinism of
words" does not really imply a new kind of obscurantist traditionalism.
XXIV
If myths and other "institutions" are the products of so many ages

of optimizing "selection," and if the imagination is unable to compete
with them by projecting new patterns having a comparable power,
does this not mean that traditional ways - or, at any rate, whatever
ways are generated by the process of "selection," as opposed to any
conscious and purposive constructive effort on our part- are always
the best ways? Arnold Gehlen certainly conveyed the impression that
this was his view - that the modem dismantling of traditional customs
and attitudes, while perhaps inevitable, was overall a loss without a
corresponding gain. In Blumenberg's case, if the "objective progress"
that does occur comes about, as it were, behind our backs, uninten-
tionally, as a result of a blind process of "selection," it would seem
that the only active role that might be left to rationality would be that
of generating theories or techniques (whose fate would be decided not
by rationality itself but by "selection"), while in the area of human
interrelations it might have no role at all. We would be facing perhaps
the most sophisticated form of anti-Enlightenment obscurantism yet
seen. Is this actually what Blumenberg is arguing for?
Before answering this question, it may be well to extend it by raising
an even broader question about theories that advocate tolerance of
myth, a question that is seldom raised in humanistic discussions of
the subject but that certainly ought to be faced. One way to bring
this question into focus is to compare Cassirer's earlier and later books
on myth. In the 1920s Cassirer followed the Romantics and the eth-
nologists a long way toward granting myth equal dignity with rationality
and seeking to understand it sympathetically, "from inside," as a
coherent way of being in the world-even though he never really
abandoned the Enlightenment philosophy of history according to which
myth is ultimately, and necessarily, replaced by logos. In The Myth of
the State (1 946), on the other hand, the emphasis is ultimately very
much on this philosophy of history, and on the awful anomaly by
which-in the years since Cassirer's first work on this subject-the
Nazis had apparently resurrected myth in full seriousness, outside the
harmless domain of literature, and with dreadful results for millions
of people. Myth was now something that "lurks in the dark and waits
for its hour and opportunity," which an'ives when an apparently rational
social organization is weakened and "no longer able to combat the
demonic mythical powers. "q
xxv
Is this an appropriate description of what happened in Germany

in the 1920s and 1930s? It is easy to see how it would seem so to
one whose life and world were completely disrupted by the events of
the period. And even in retrospect, it often seems as though no amount
of economic, social, or political analysis of conditions in Germany prior
to the Nazi takeover quite suffices to explain it or what followed it.
Certainly everyone would agree that "irrational" factors of some sort
played a major role.
But can such factors properly be identified with "myth"? Cassirer
thought the distinctive characteristic of what he called the Nazi myths
was that unlike traditional myths, they were "manufactured," "myth
made according to plan. "r Clearly these were not myths in the sense
that Romanticism understood myth-either as inherited and primordial
or as products of the free, poetic imagination. But Cassirer, attracted
though he was to the Romantic theory of myth (and, unlike quite a
few writers, he refused to hold the Romantics responsible for the later
"rehabilitation and glorification of myth in modem politics"),S did not
really believe in that theory. And his own writings on myth were,
ultimately, more eclectic and descriptive than they were sharply de-
finitive. The result was that, while he had no trouble recognizing Nazi
"science" and "philosophy" as bogus, he had no criterion by which
to categorize their "myths" as equally bogus. So, when he sought to
put his finger on what had made the phenomenon of Nazism possible,
"myth" was (as it has been for many others) a tempting candidate.
Seemingly more concrete than sheer "irrationality," but setting up a
sharper contrast to rationality than is present in such familiar phe-
nomena as ideology, propaganda, uneven historical development, or
the state (whose relation to myth Cassirer did not manage to clarify),
"myth" was a category that seemed to express the apocalyptic quality
of what Nazism had brought about.
His analysis found widespread acceptance. Indeed, many readers
must have found it rather unsurprising. For (and this is what I wanted
to bring out with this digression) there is a very familiar "common-
sense" version of rationalism that follows Cassirer's example here in
categorizing whatever is resistant to rationality as "myth," lTIuch as
Descartes once spoke of "prejudice," or Bacon of "idols, "the only
difference being that "myth" lends itself more readily to demonization
than prejudice or "idols" did-no doubt because, since an epoch of
our past history is associated with it, its 'reappearance' has the dan-
XXVI
gerous flavor of atavism. In periods when rationality seems especially

threatened, it is easy to picture myth as a sort of Manichean antagonist,
which rationality must always combat. To the extent that rationality
is in an ongoing crisis, such a view will be even more persuasive.
And yet it is itself quite mythical in character. The idea of a force
or agency that is antagonistic to rationality has the narrative character
that is natural to a confrontation of hypostatized 'powers.' This explains
Cassirer's use of lurid metaphors (myth "lurks in the dark," and so
on) and his failure to examine the supposed confrontation of myth
and rationality concretely. Indeed, it explains the way we all keep this
idea 'in the back of our minds,' as a sort of unacknowledged myth
of last resort.
If the demonization of myth is precisely that- a mythicization of
the difference between myth and rationality-then the other side of
the coin is that myths, in the narrower sense of the pregnant stories
and images that we inherit from a preliterate past, are in fact different
from the emotionally loaded images and slogans of modem racism,
charismatic leadership, and so on. What exactly is the difference? The
distinctive quality of genuine myths, which the modem "manufactured"
ones - however great their emotional appeal may be - must always
lack, is the 'significance' (see part I, chapter 3) or 'pregnance' that is
produced by the process of "selection," through millenniums of story-
telling, that Blumenberg entitles the "Darwinism of words." This quality
cannot be reproduced by "new myths," whether they are benevolently
or diabolically constructed. When Nazi "philosophers" talked about
"the myth of the twentieth century" and the like, we have to understand
that they were attempting, illegitimately, to appropriate the dignity
of myth, just as (often at the same time) they illegitimately invoked
the dignity of science for their racist doctrines. If we can keep this
fact in focus, we may even be able to invoke genuine myth on 'our
side' in the struggle against irrational doctrines and movements, as
Thomas Mann, for example, tried to do. Certainly our modest capacity
for rationality can use all the help it can get.
Indeed, a certain modesty on the part of rationality may be the
most important moral of this whole story. t If Cassirer had not followed
most of his preceptors, since the seventeenth century, in assuming
that the appearance of rationality in the form of philosophy and science
removed any need for myth, he might have been less surprised at
the uneven development of effective rationality in his homeland-at
XXVll
what Blumenberg has described as "the striking nonsimultaneities in

what is chronologically simultaneous ... the fundamental delay of
enlightenment. "u A rationality that is supposed to meet man's every
need can easily disappoint its advocates as well as those to whom it
is advocated. It seems likely that it is an unspoken disappointment of
this sort that explains the presence in our minds of the "myth of last
resort" that I have been discussing, which blames the failures of ra-
tionality on a dangerous and implacable opponent called "myth."
Having said this much about the tendency to set myth up as the
great bogeyman - a tendency that is in the back of enough minds to
need to be confronted - I will now return to the previous question of
whether the "Darwinism of words" implies (if not a pact with the
devil, at least) an obscurantist traditionalism. v If a "selection" process
among mental constructs produces not only striking stories and figures
but, more generally, valuable "institutions," with the variety and per-
suasiveness of which the mere imagination of individuals cannot com-
pete, does this mean that conscious and intentional departures from
traditional ways are, in general, unjustified? What is the role of ra-
tionality in such a situation- if it has any role at all? Once again,
myth seems to threaten to be incompatible with rationality.
The passage in which Blumenberg confronts this issue is one of the
most fascinating passages in the book. The key sentences are these:
"What the heading of 'institutions' covers is, above all, a distribution
of burdens of proof. Where an institution exists, the question of its
rational foundation is not, of itself, urgent, and the burden of proof
always lies on the person who objects to the arrangement that it carries
with it. "w The basis of this presumption in favor of the institution is,
of course, that, like a product of organic evolution, it is not only
"something that has at least proved itself over long periods of time,
that has been refined as the product of countless rounds of selection,
but also something that did not at least immediately lead into fatal
dead ends, that did not operate as a liability detracting from success
in life."
But how did the distribution of "burdens of proof' get involved
here? Shouldn't the "burden" be on rationality in general-on science,
in the widest sense - to establish rational modes of behavior and thought
structures, of which individuals who want to be rational can avail
thelTIselves? How is it that "the person who objects" suddenly carries
all the onus of responsibility here?
XXVlll
The answer is twofold. First, as Blumenberg writes, "enlighten-

ment" -because it rejects dogma, revelation, and 'authority' in general
as sources of justified belief- "allows thought to be legitimated only
by the fact that everyone does it himself and for himself.... " That
is, it is not good enough to accept modes of behavior or thought
structures as endorsed by Science, even if it were possible for Science
to produce a finished set of such modes and structures for us to adopt.
Weare only rational if, as far as possible, we think through for ourselves
the reasons for what we do and think. It is only the fact that people
in general do that, or can do that, that gives science the authority it
has in our culture as the sum (potentially, despite all the distortions
due to inevitable specialization, professionalization, and so on) of the
active rationality of all of us.
But, second, it is manifestly not possible for each person to work
out a rational justification, from scratch, of every mode of behavior
or thought structure that he needs to employ in order to live his actual
life. Even for our collective rationality, as science, we now generally
recognize that such an undertaking-though we are engaged in it-
is not one that can be completed (as Descartes, for example, seems
to have thought it could be). All the more so for each of us individually.
So the "meager finitude of the life that the thinker-for-himself has
disposition over" means that he simply has to take some things for
granted. Thoroughly and explicitly rational "decision-making" is not
possible in every case. And that, of course, is where "institutions"
come in. Blumenberg acknowledges the danger that goes along with
them: "Every economy of ideas for which no rational foundation is
given becomes suspect when it presents itself as the demand for sub-
mission to something for which no rational foundation can be given,
and thus becomes the center of new anxieties" - a result that would
contradict the inherent purpose of myth (namely, the overcoming of
the ultimate anxiety caused by the "absolutism of reality"), but is very
possible if the relation of myth (and of "institutions" in general) to
rationality is not dearly understood. On the other hand, there is also
reason to distrust rationality, which
is all too ready to engage in destruction when it fails to recognize the

rationality of things for which no rational foundation is given and
believes that it can afford to allow itself to get carried away by the
process of establishing rational foundations. Descartes thought that
.
XXIX
the best way to build cities rationally was to begin by razing the old
cities. Not even World War II yielded proof of this prospect for ra-
tionality. There are moments in which the outcomes of centuries and
millenniums are thoughtlessly sacrificed. What had been held fast and
passed on by a loyalty shielded from all reflection becomes a source
of offense and is gotten rid of. But one does not have to be conservative
to see that the demand for 'critical' destruction and then for a final
rational foundation leads to burdens of proof that, if they were really
accepted and undertaken with the seriousness with which they are
asserted and demanded, would no longer leave any room for what
is supposed to be gained in the process .... So the selection of constants
over long periods of time is in fact a condition of the possibility of
running the risks of 'trial and error' in parts of one's behavior. ...
This is not a "counsel of despair" for rationality. It is simply the

rational way to deal with the antinomy between the endless nature
of the process of rational inquiry and the finite nature of our lives,
which makes it "rational not to be rational to the utmost extent," and
to want to see good arguments for abandoning practices that, even
if the reasons for them are not obvious, have so far 'stood the test of
. ,
tIme.
At the same time, Blumenberg really is open to such arguments.
Unlike Hobbes and Gehlen, who are both persuaded that the only
rational thing to do is submit to an inherited something that they
believe serves to solve man's fundamental problem (to the "sovereign,"
or to primordial human "institutions"), x Blumenberg is quite prepared
to be persuaded that a particular human "institution" is not at present
functional. But the burden of proof is, as we said, on the critic, not
on the "institution" and those who abide by it.
When this account of the matter is understood, it becolnes clear
that this book is not a Romantic brief for myth and tradition against
rationality and Enlightenment, any more than it is the reverse of that.
Instead, it presents a clearly worked-out proposal for overcoming that
unnecessary and debilitating conflict in our understanding of ourselves
and our history.
6. Some Concrete Applications
The book contains a great deal more than the philosophical analysis
I have sketched. It contains a detailed discussion of monotheism and
xxx
the category of dogma as they emerge from and differentiate them-

selves from polytheism and myth - a discussion that\ casts new light
on the Bible, on Gnosticism (a historically crucial intermediate case),
on Christianity, and on 'nonreligious' phenomena such as utopianism
and what Sorel called social myths. If the tenets of faith are not "mere
myth," as our 'Manichaean' myth of the agency antagonistic to ra-
tionality would describe them, and if it is not helpful to call them
"mere" dogma, either, what exactly are they? And what is the quasi-
religious attitude that is shared by adherents of such "invisible gods"Y
as the Revolution, or Being? Blumenberg brings out the outlines of a
'dogmatic' attitude to (what it regards as the one, all-important) truth,
an attitude that he does not present as a bugaboo, but as one of a
small number of very persuasive attitudes to reality and truth that we
are acquainted with. Christians (like utopians and others) may perhaps
feel that his analysis is mistaken, but they will have to admit that few
philosophers who are not professing Christians have treated Christianity
as seriously and as thoughtfully as Blumenberg does in this book and
in his two previous major works.
Finally, the book examines many detailed examples of the "work
on myth" that continues in modern literature. One of the remarkable
facts brought out in this connection is that the durability of individual
myths (which led Romanticism to think of them as atemporal, primeval)
is not incompatible with their acquiring wholly new and unsuspected
aspects.
Time does not wear away instances of pregnance; it brings things out
in them- though one may not add that these things were 'in them'
all along. That holds, in the case of myth, least of all for extensions.
When Albert Camus said of Sisyphus that one should imagine him as
being happy, the change of 'sign' was an increase in the visibility of
the myth's potential. When Paul Valery 'corrected' the Faust story by
suggesting that the only way we could picture the one who had once
been tempted, now, was as himself tempting Mephistopheles, some-
thing became perceptible that simply could not have been made up
and added on, but instead was irresistibly drawing near as the classical
demon figure grew increasingly inferior. z
These examples and many others from our recorded "work on myth"
give us glimpses of the nature of the unrecorded "work if myth" that
the hypotheses of the "absolutism of reality" and the "Darwinism of
XXXI
words" seek to characterize, and at the same time add to our under-
standing of the ('postmythical') epochs and authors who produced
them.
The second half of the book is an extended case study of "work
on myth," the case being the Prometheus myth, from its earliest
recorded appearances, in Hesiod and Aeschylus, to the twentieth-
century versions of Gide and Kafka. In contrast to the apparently
simple recorded history of the myth of Sisyphus, for example, that
of Prometheus presents an incredible variety of aspects and interpre-
tations in the course of these two and a half millenniums. The one
writer whom Blumenberg singles out for particularly extended treat-
ment in this context is Goethe, to whom part IV is devoted. Readers
familiar with Goethe will not be surprised at the importance he is
given here. Several facts make this natural, if not inevitable: his historical
situation, between the German (and French) Enlightenment and Ro-
manticism (he joined neither 'party'); his manifestly contrived and
artificial position in society, as court genius in Weimar, which made
the role of ideas in his existence both more crucial and more visible
than it is in most lives; and his combination of aesthetic 'polytheism'
and Spinozist scientific pantheism, that is, of 'mythical' and 'modem'
patterns of thought, a duality that reappears in his combination of
imaginative work on myth (especially the series of revisions of the
Prometheus theme, from his youthful "Prometheus" ode of 1773, to
Pandora, in 1808, and beyond it as well) and conceptual work (doc-
umented mainly in his Conversations and his autobiography, Dichtung
und Wahrheit)-both types of work being vital to his ability to function
not only as an artist but also as a human being. Nearly every German
philosopher deals with Goethe in one way or another, often at length;
Cassirer, Karl Lowith, and (in the German "cultural sphere," though
not a German) Georg Lukacs are some prominent examples. It is
doubtful that any of them has gotten into the texture of his life and
works in anything like the way Blumenberg does in part IV of this
book. At the same time, Blumenberg is able to bring Goethe's 'world
view' - including some of its most potent and paradoxical components,
such as the combination of polytheism and Spinozism, the concept of
the "demonic," the dictum "Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse," and
the relationship to Napoleon-into a focus that appears to be unique
in the literature on Goethe. Thus we see in fascinating detail how an
appreciation of work on "images," as Goethe called them, which sees
..
XXXll
it neither as a substitute for nor as unrelated to the conceptual work

of rationality, can help us to understand what makes possible the life
and productivity of an individual, just as much as those of the human
specIes.
7. "Bringing Myth to an End," and Human Autonomy
In conclusion I want to examine another concept of Blumenberg's,

one that may at first seem somewhat paradoxical in relation to what
I have said so far. aa This is the idea of "bringing myth to an end,"
which provides the title of part II, chapter 4. Seeing this title in this
book, one might expect to find a critique of the Enlightenment idea
that myth can be, or has long since been, brought to an end with the
emergence of philosophy or science. But this is not at all what one
does find. The discussion does not center on any of the typical rep-
resentatives of this thesis, from Descartes to the present, but rather
on the series of versions of the Faust story-by Lessing, Goethe, Butor,
and Valery - and on a series of modem 'philosophers' myths' beginning
with what Blumenberg calls the "fundamental myth of German Ide-
alism" (that is, principally, of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel). He sees
these authors (both the writers and the philosophers) as attempting
to bring myth to an end by means of itself, rather than by offering a
substitute for it. The Idealists, for whom "I, the eternal subject, am
the bearer of this universe, whose whole existence is nothing but a
relationship to me," as Schopenhauer puts it, are offering a "last
myth," a final myth that is so comprehensive in its implications that
it leaves no room for other mythical figures about whom other stories
could be told. bb Valery's Mon Faust, on the other hand-like Gide's
and Kafka's versions of Prometheus (which are discussed in part V,
chapter 3)-is an attempt to bring myth to an end by the indirect
means of bringing one particular great myth to an end. This would
be accomplished by progressively deforming the story, by ignoring or
reversing what had seemed to be its fundamental patterns (as in the
reversal of tempter and tempted in Valery's Faust), to such an extent
that it is only barely recognizable as the same myth, at which point
(if one were completely successful) the telling and retelling that is the
life of the story would have to come to an end.
What do these things mean? They have to be understood, Blu-
menberg says, in relation to a projected goal that is the precise opposite
XXXlll
of the hypothetical initial "absolutism of reality" that gave rise to

myth in the first place. The absolutism of reality is the problem that
myth helps to solve. If myth were brought to an end, we would have
arrived at the definitive solution of that problem, which would pre-
sumably mean the subject's cOlnplete disposition over reality-the
"absolutism of the subject," in fact-in which there could no longer
be any need for myth. The Idealists are, in effect, baldly stating that
we are in that situation and, in fact, that we always have been. To
make their assertion plausible, they put it in the form of a story about
the subject and 'its' world-a story that is presented as "philosophy"
rather than as myth, so as not to call attention to what it has in
common with the phenomena of human dependency that it is trying
to bring to an end. Valery, Gide, and Kafka, on the other hand, seek
(in effect) to demonstrate that we have arrived at that situation, by
bringing one great myth to a standstill. For, presumably, if a writer's
magic were powerful enough to "bring to an end" one of the most
stubbornly persistent mental constructs we possess, one that no in-
dividual brought into existence in the first place, then the writer (or
we) would be beyond needing such constructs any longer.
The challenge of bringing myth to an end in either of these ways
is, Blumenberg says, one of the greatest stimuli to modem literary
and philosophical dealings with myth. In literature, it has produced
some of the most fascinating works of this century. In philosophy-
German philosophy, in particular-it has produced a long and some-
times bewildering sequence of attempts to occupy definitively the
position of the final myth. (To mention only a few of these attempts,
after those of the Idealists: Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence," Max
Scheler's story of the God who becomes himself through the \vorld
process, Heidegger's story of Being.) It does not appear that any of
these attempts, either in philosophy or in literature, has in fact brought
rnyth to an end. As Blumenberg finally says about Kafka's 'eschato-
logical' version of Prometheus: "But what if there were still something
to say, after all?"CC It seems impossible to exclude the possibility that
the rnyth might after all be capable of further variation, and thus of
retelling- that it might, in fact, go on.
This should not be surprising if we take seriously the parallelisln
of "absolutism of reality" and "bringing rnyth to an end." A definitive
solut ion to the problem of the absolutism of reality \vould be just as
lnueh a hypothetical "limiting case" as is the problem to \vhich it
XXXIV
would be addressed. Neither 'end' of the history of myth is something

that we can know has in fact been realized. Both are necessary postulates
in understanding what we have done, and are doing, with myths, but
they function like the "limit" that is approached by a converging
function in mathematics: One never in fact arrives at it. If there is a
'human condition,' then it is between these two limits.
Does accepting such a 'condition'-recognizing that myth cannot
be definitively brought to an end, that we cannot know that we have
reached the point where we no longer need it-mean that we have
to renounce the Enlightenment's dream of the autonomous individual
who dictates to reality, rather than being dictated to by it? And does
recognizing Fichte's, Hegel's, Nietzsche's, and Heidegger's stories as
a series that is potentially endless, because they attempt something
that cannot be definitively accomplished, require us to conclude that
such efforts are simply in vain?
Blumenberg would answer both of these questions in the negative.
The sequence of would-be 'final' myths that he reviews is not, to him,
in vain, because it reflects an effort that can be better understood and
more effectively pursued, even though never terminated; and such
understanding and effort directly serve the autonomous individual,
though likewise never definitively 'establishing' him.
This becomes evident when Blumenberg contrasts two kinds of
"final myth": those (like Nietzsche's myth of eternal recurrence and
Hans Jonas's myth of God's putting the success of his Creation, and
his own 'happiness,' irrevocably in man's hands) that continue Idealism's
tendency to make the subject-man-responsible for the world as a
whole, and those (represented here by Schopenhauer's myth of rein-
carnations) that come closer to a "standard for final myths" that
Blumenberg says Schopenhauer established, which is (in Blumenberg's
words) that they should present "the subject's responsibility to himself
and for himself. "dd
This latter category is easier to grasp in the light of a recent short
essay, "Reflections on a Proposition of Nietzsche," in which Blumenberg
presents vvhat he regards as an attractive version of the myth of the
immortality of the soul. ee He interprets Nietzsche's note, "That we
could bear being immortal- that would be the highest thing," as
suggesting that we should imagine immortality as the capacity to see
all the consequences of one's actions (after as well as before one's
death) and to remember (without benefit of repression or forgetfulness)
xxxv
everything that one did; from which flows the question: Could one,
in fact, bear it - to continue eternally as the person who had that past
and those consequences? This myth certainly serves very well to focus
one's "responsibility to and for oneself," while avoiding the 'superman'
implication of Idealism and of (most of) Nietzsche, and of Jonas's
myth - the implication that man must accept responsibility for reality
as a whole.
So not all 'final myths' are created equal. Some meet the "standard
for final myths" better than others do. But what is the status of this
"standard"? Schopenhauer laid it down by example, in his myth of
reincarnations, which resembles Blumenberg's myth of immortality
in the way it focuses on the individual's responsibility for his own fate
(though it has logical difficulties, which Blumenberg brings out in the
final paragraphs of the chapter), but equally important is the fact that
Schopenhauer noted an essential connection between his myth and
Kant's "postulate" of the immortality of the soul. Kant held that such
a postulate was necessary for practical reason (even though it could
not be known to be true, as metaphysicians had thought it could, by
theoretical reason) because it held open the possibility that virtue might
be rewarded in the hereafter, so that our sense of justice would not
be contradicted outright by reality. There was also the possibility, if
the "postulate" of immortality was expanded into a myth of rein-
carnation, that virtue might be easier to achieve - one might make
progress toward (the impossible) complete compliance with the Cat-
egorical Imperative-in future lives. Overall, then, the postulate's
function was to ward off moral resignation due to the difficulties
encountered by the goodwill in the real world.
This was just what Schopenhauer's myth of reincarnations was meant
to do (though by the reverse process of threatening punishment in future
lives for suffering that one inflicted during this life). And Blumenberg's
myth of immortality, without bringing in moral criteria, as such, does
the same thing. Thus all three philosophers - irrespective of whether
they propose "postulates" or myths-aim to encourage an autonomous
individual who takes charge of his own fate, which is, in fact, the goal
of the Enlightenment and of modem "human self-assertion" (as Blu-
menberg called it in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age) in general.
The effectiveness of Kant's doctrine of the postulates-indeed, of
his whole analysis of practical reason - has been lirnited by its schelnatic
character, beginning with the distinction of theoretical froin practical
XXXVI
reason: What exactly is a necessary but unknowable "postulate"? How

can theoretical reason be satisfied with action based on premises that
it can never test? Myth, on the other hand, which wears its untestability
on its face and does not claim to be "reason," is at least something
whose function we have been familiar with for a long time.
To those who think that under either name, myth or postulate,
immortality is "obsolete rubbish," Blumenberg replies that "the op-
pressiveness of contingency, which lies behind the myth, does not
cease." Whether as a result of "the conflict that arises from the fact
that a subject is the result of a physical process" which it can never
hope to control completely (the conflict that Idealism seeks to resolve
by projecting the subject behind the physical process), or as a result
of the more recently recognized" overwhelming presumption that one
is produced by alien, social agencies" (the presumption that existen-
tialism desperately resists with its doctrine that existence is prior to
essence), it is clear that the autonomous subject is in chronic trouble. fT
Our consciousness of both of these types of contingency will (if anything)
be increased by the progress of science, which, while it creates new
means for us to use in controlling a continuously increasing range of
reality, at the same time continually strengthens the presumption that
the most fundamental layers of our personhood are exogenously de-
termined. This ultimate contingency seems to be, in fact, the irreducible,
permanent form of the absolutism of reality-right at the core of the
human subject who dreamed of freeing himself from it.
This being the case, one can see that "final myths," if they can
help us to deal in some way with this permanent problem, have a
crucial role to play. However successful the various myths that have
been created for this purpose may be judged to be, the problem that
they address is clear. And having it clearly in view, it is easier to see
why, to maximize their chances of effectiveness, final myths should
present "the subject's responsibility to himself and for himself." This
is the minimum position that must be defended if autonomy is not
to be entirely lost.
A further implication of Blumenberg's account is, presumably, that
the authors of the "final myths" that do not meet this standard so
well- because they go beyond it, to extremes - would nevertheless
recognize its validity. When one thinks about Fichte's moralism,
Nietzsche's doctrine of the will, Heidegger's "authenticity" and "res-
oluteness," it seems not unlikely that they would in fact do so. (In this
XXXVll
case their extravagant final myths would be evidence of the need for
further "work," rather than of some fundamental modern hubris.)
Indeed, the premise underlying the "standard" - that one must accept
responsibility for being who one is, in spite of all physical and social
determinisms - is so fundamental for us that it seems safe to assume
that the writers who seek to bring myth to an end by bringing one
great traditional myth to an end would recognize its validity for their
efforts too-even though the claim that one has brought Faust or
Prometheus to an end (which, of course, is never explicitly made)
would itselfbe about as hubristic as anything Fichte or Nietzsche wrote.
For their real goal, just as with the philosophers, is not omnipotence
or omnicompetence, but only a termination of dependency and de-
terminism, a definitive exclusion of the absolutism of reality, which
would be the achievement of the Kantian, the modern, and the (perhaps)
universal human goal of autonomy. gg
Unattainable, or not definitively attainable, though that goal is, the
more clearly we formulate it the more evidently necessary the pursuit
of it becomes. It is a major step forward in this clarification when the
role of myth in the process-alongside the well-known and much
celebrated role of reason - is explained, and when it becomes clear
that the two modes, reason and myth, are both just as necessary to
the pursuit of this 'end' of human history as they were 'in the beginning,'
in the first confrontation with (or, more accurately, avoidance of) the
absolutism of reality.
Acknowledgments
The translator is grateful for a grant from the Translations Program

of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which made this
translation possible.
He also wishes to thank Professor Ennis Rees for permission to use
a number of lines from his translations of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey;
and Mrs. Hazel D. Kaufmann for her generous permission to reprint
the whole of Professor Walter Kaufmann's translation of Goethe's
"Prometheus," as well as lines froln Professor Kaufmann's translation
of Goethe's "Urworte: Orphisch."
XXXVlll
Notes
a. Work on Myth, originally published as Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), is Blu-
menberg's third major work. The first, The Legitimacy if the Modern Age {Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1983)-translated from the revised edition (1973-1976) of Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit
{Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966)-is the only one previously available in English. The intervening
major work is Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975). Since Work on
Myth, Blumenberg has published Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981). His other
works include Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1960), reprinted from A rchiv
for Begriffsgeschichte 6 (1960); 7-142; Die kopernikanische Wende (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965); and
Schijfbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft
289 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979).
b. Cassirer's works on myth extend from the second volume (I 925) of his Philosophy if Symbolic
Forms, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955) to The Myth if
the State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946).
c. Blumenberg gave an address assessing Cassirer's accomplishment, and containing some very
pregnant indications of what, in Blumenberg's opinion, remained to be done, on the occasion
of his acceptance of the University of Heidelberg's Kuno Fischer Prize for work in the history
of philosophy, in July 1974. It appeared under the title "Ernst Cassirers gedenkend ... ", in
Revue Internationale de Philosophie 28 (I 974): 456-463, and is reprinted in his Wirklichkeiten in
denen wir Leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981), pp. 163-172.
d. Pp. 3-4 below.
e. P. 120 below.
f. "Anthropologische Annaherung an die Aktualitat der Rhetorik," in Wirklichkeiten in denen

wir leben, pp. 114-115. {This paper was first published in Italian in Il Verri. Rivista di Letteratura
35/36 (I 971): 49-72.) (On destruierenlDestruktion see translator's note a to part I, chapter 2.) In
the passage I have quoted, Blumenberg goes on to say that "a first attempt of this kind was
made by Paul Alsberg in 1922 in his Das Menschheitsratsel . ... Then in 1940, Arnold Gehlen-
with his work, Der Mensch, which, though questionable in its intention, was nevertheless fun-
damental-expanded this beginning into a theory of perception and of language, and since
then has extended it into the foundation of a doctrine of 'institutions.' " Alsberg published a
rewritten and updated version of the argument of his Menschheitsratsel in English in 1970, under
the title In Quest if Man: A Biological Approach to the Problem if Man's Place in Nature (Oxford and
New York: Pergamon Press, 1970). At present, Gehlen's work is represented in English only
by Man in the Age if Technology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), a translation of
Sozialpsychologische Probleme in der industriellen Gesellschrift (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1949), which was later
reissued as Die Seele im technischen Zeitalter (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1957). For more on Blumenberg's
relation to Gehlen, see parts 4 and 5 of this introduction and note x.
g. One twentieth-century philosopher to whom a comparison would be illuminating is, of

course, Heidegger, who also (following Kierkegaard) gave Angst a central position in his structure
of thought but did not ground his understanding of it in man's unique biological status, as
Blumenberg suggests we should do; nor did he legitimate myth, or culture in general, as a
means of avoiding it, as Blumenberg does. Blumenberg's key passage on this aspect of Heidegger's
thought, which is on p. 110, ends: "[Human] life is the result of a long history of congnlence
between [man's] environment and 'signification'-congruence that is only shattered in its most
recent phase. In this history, life itself continually deprives itself of an immediate relation to
its abysses, to what would make it impossible, and thus refuses to obey the summons of its
terrifYing 'authenticity.' " For Blumenberg's relation to another recent philosophical anthro-
pologist, Arnold Gehlen, see note f, above, and note x, below (and corresponding text).
XXXIX
Tr~"1slator's Introduction
h. P. 45 below.
i. In the paper cited in note c, above, Blumenberg describes Cassirer's SubstanzbegrifJ und
Funktionsbegriff of 1910 (translated as Substance and Function [LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1923D as
a work that has "still not been fully dealt with and has been largely, and unjustly, forgotten"
(p. 164).
j. The key passage on the status of the "positions" that are "reoccupied" IS found In The
Legitimacy if the Modern Age, pp. 466-467.
k. On the peculiar term pregnance, see translator's note i to part I, chapter 3, below.
1. The renewed interest, recently, in the idea of social evolution (see the references in Jurgen
Habermas's "Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism," in his Communication and
the EvoLution ifSociety [Boston: Beacon Press, 1979]) is aimed at explaining major social changes,
such as (in Habermas's version) from neolithic societies to early civilizations, from early to
"developed" civilizations, and from the latter to the modem age (ibid., pp. 157-158). This is
quite different from Blumenberg's interest in explaining the survival power of myths-through
all those changes-as a result of the millenniums of testing and selecting out that they have
undergone. And when Blumenberg describes culture, including science and technology, as
being subjected to a process of selection in place of human individuals, he does not relate this
process to comprehensive social systems; what he has in mind here, as being subject to selection,
are specific techniques, theories, and "institutions." It is interesting to note that in both myth
and the field of science and technology there is a "variety-generating mechanism" at work (a
large number of storytellers, a large number of theoreticians and tinkerers), in which one could
see a randomness analogous to that of mutations in biological evolution-a randomness for
which there is no evident analogue on the level of the evolution of "social systems." Habermas
himself regards the process of learning, which may contribute constructively to new social
formations, as central, so that despite the large leaps or discontinuities between the stages of
this kind of "social evolution," it still seems to have more in common with the Enlightenment
model of cooperative progress than it has with a Darwinian mechanism of selection.
m. P. 165 below. (Emphasis added.)
n. A bold statement that comes closer to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophies of

history than we might expect from the author of The Legitimacy if the Modern Age. The statement
differs from those philosophies by making it clear that the asserted progress is not relative to
all possible human values, but "by this criterion," that is, by the criterion of contributing to
the capacity for survival; and it also differs from them by avoiding (by explicit reference to
"whatever else [history] may be") the implication that this "optimization" is the central, essential
process in-the "meaning or'-history as a whole.
o. Gehlen presented his doctrine of "institutions" in Urmensch und Sp;itkultllr (Bonn: Athenaum,
1956).
p. Pp. 161-162 below. On Neptunism and Vulcanism see translator's note c to part II, chapter
2.
q. Cassirer, The Myth if the State, p. 280.
r. Ibid., p. 282.
s. Ibid., p. 183.
t. In The Legitimacy if the Modern Age, p. 99, Blumenberg wrote that "this book's concept or
rationality is neither that of an agency of salvation nor that of a creative originality either,"
xl
but that of "a sufficient rationality. It is just enough to accomplish the post-medieval self-
assertion and to bear the consequences of this emergency self-consolidation." In "Anthro-
pologische Annaherung on die Aktualitat der Rhetorik," p. 124, he discusses "the principle
of insufficent reason (principium rationis insujficientis)" that is "the axiom of all rhetoric." In both
cases the analogy and the contrast to Leibniz's "principle of sufficient reason" is explicit.
u. Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit, first edition (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), p. 60.
v. This interpretation of Blumenberg's respect for 'institutions' is not just a hypothetical possibility.
At least one quite painstaking reviewer-H. L. Ollig, S.]., writing in TheoLogie und PhiLosophie
56 (1981): 148-152-was unhappily convinced of its correctness.
w. Part II, chapter 1. This and all the remaining quotations in this section can be found in
the eight paragraphs beginning on p. 163 below.
x. The passage in Blumenberg's "Anthropologische Annaherung an die Aktualitat der Rhetorik,"

quoted in note f, continues: "With Gehlen's absolutism of 'institutions,' anthropology returns,
in a certain way, to its point of departure in the model of the social contract [Staatsvertrag].
The discussion of this anthropology has not yet settled the question of whether that fateful
return is inevitable." The account of "institutions," in relation to rationality, that is given in
this book must clearly represent a major contribution to that discussion.
y. P. 222 below.
z. P. 69-70 below.
aa. This section is a brief version of part of my "Introduction to Blumenberg," which appears
together with part II, chapter 4, of this book in New German Critique 32 (Spring/Summer 1984).
bb. Readers who are familiar with Schelling and Hegel will be able to translate this more
Fichtean formulation into the language of "nature achieving consciousness of itself' or of
"absolute spirit."
cc. The last sentence of the book.
dd. P. 291 below.
e<;: "Nachdenken tiber einen Satz von Nietzsche," one of three short essays collectively entitled
"Uber den Rand der Wirklichkeit hinaus," in AR.z.ente. Zeitschrijt for Literatur (Feb. 1983): 16-27.
ff These three quotations are from pp. 293, 269, and 270 below.
gg. This extension of the Kantian idea of freedom as autonomy is a consistent development
of the approach to Kant and to ethics that Blumenberg first sketched out in "1st eine philosophische
Ethik gegenwartig moglich?", in Studium GeneraLe 6 (1953): 174-184. See also (especially on
Kant's "postulates"), "Kant und die Frage nach dem 'gnadigen Gott,' " Studium GeneraLe 7
(1954): 554-570, and "Anthropologische Annaherung an die Aktualitat der Rheterik," in JJ'irk-
Lichkeiten in denen wir Leben, p. 128 in particular.
Part I
Archaic Division of Powers
1
After the Absolutism of Reality
They could not put the determining divine principle at sufficient distance
from themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the
determining forces could be kept at a distance from man's earthly
being, so that human lungs could have air.
- Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920a
To those who are bored with this success, the mastering of reality
may seem a dream that has been dreamed out, or was never worth
dreaming. It is easy for the cultivation of boredom and discontent to
commence when one accepts as a matter of course, and no longer
takes note of, the conditions under which life experiences its difficulties
in what are now only marginal problems. Cultures that have not yet
achieved mastery of their reality continue to dream the dream and
would snatch its realization away from those who think they have
already awakened from it.
If one turns from the professionally (or even professorially) depicted
terrors of the present, and all the more of the future, to the past and
to its past [die Voruergangenheit "the pluperfect"], one encounters the
necessity of picturing an initial situation that serves the purpose of
the old status naturalis [state of nature] of philosophical theories of
culture and the state. This concept of the limit toward which the
extrapolation of tangible, historical features into the archaic tends can
be formally defined in a single designation: as th~ absol~ti~!ll of ~~~1ity.
What it means is that man c~_I!le close to not having control of the
- ----- -- - - --------
4
Part I
conditions of his existence and, what is m0re important, believed that

he_ s~m.p-lyJa~ked -~~!!t!Ql~oI-~h.,~m. --it may have-be~n -earlier or later
that he i!lt_er~~~g this circumstance of the superior power [Uber-
machtigkeitl of what is (in each case) other [i.e., not himselfl by assuming
the exist~J}~~[~uperior p-ow~rs [Ubermachtenl.
What justifies us in using this limit concept is the common core of
'"/
all currently respected theories on the subject of l!nthrop.-2g~~ii

Whatever may have been the appearance of the prehuman creature
that was induced, by an enforced or an accidental change in the
environment it inhabited, to avail itself of the sensory advantage of
raising itself upright into a bipedal posture and to stabilize that ad-
vantage in spite of all its internal disadvantages in the functioning of
organs - that creature had, in any case, left the protection of a more
hidden form of life, and an adapted one, in order to expose itself to
the risks of the widened horizon of its perception, which were also
those of its..E~~~~~y~.hi~ It was, as yet, no forward thrust of curiosity,
no gain in pleasure from the broadened horizon, no exaltation at
acquiring verticality, but merely the exploitation of a favorable op-
portunity for survival by avoiding the pressure of selection, which
would have driven toward irreversible specialization. It was a situational
leap, which made the unoccupied distant horizon into the ongoing
expectation of hitherto unknown things. What came about through
the combination of leaving the shrinking rain forest for the savanna
and settling in caves was a combination of the meeting of new re-
quirements for performance in obtaining food outside the living places
and the old advantage of undisturbed reproduction and rearing of the
next generation, with its .£rolonged ~d ,.fQr_~k~[I1iX!g, now in the
protection of housing that was easy to close off from the outside. The
formula of "hunters and mothers" sums up the overcoming of the
loss of the old state of concealment in the primeval forest.
What is here called the absolutism of reality is the totality of what
goes with this situational leap, which is inconceivable without super-
accomplishment in consequence of a sudden lack of adaptation. Part
of this is the capacity for foresight, anticipation of what has not yet
taken place, preparation for what is absent, beyond the horizon. It all
converges on what is accomplished by concepts. Before that, though,
the pure state of indefinite anticipation is 'anxiety. 'b To formulate it
paradoxically, it is intentionality of consciousness without an object.
As a result of it, the whole horizon becomes equivalent as the totality
5
Chapter 1
of the directions from which 'it can come at one.' Freud described
the complete helplessness of the ego in the face of overwhelming
danger as the core of the traumatic situation, and saw in the child's
early demand for love the compensation for such helplessness. Ferenczi
found the correlate of the phylogenetic transition from the sea to the
land in the ontogenetic birth trauma, and no speculation is required
in order to recognize the repetition of this fundamental situation in
the emergence from the primeval forest's concealment into the savanna
as well.
If we have to seek man's origin in the category of animals that
'flee,' then we can comprehend that before the change of biotope all
signals that set off flight reactions would indeed have the coercive
power of fear but would not have to reach the level of a dominating
condition of anxiety, as long as mere movement was available as a
means of clarifying the situation. But if one imagines that this solution
was no longer, or no longer constantly, successful, then from that
point onward the situations that enforced flight either had to be dealt
with by standing one's ground or had to be avoided by means of
anticipation. The transition from reacting, in the present, to pointlike
stimuli, to the ongoing state of maximum excitement and suspense
[Ho'chstspannung] of the organic system in a state of alarm makes the
creature dependent on means by which to master dangerous situations,
even when they cannot be avoided. The focus of the state of excitement
and suspense necessarily becomes less specific as the ambiguity and
indefiniteness of the data defining the situation increase. This produces
a readiness for an attitude of expectation, of feeling one's way forward,
that refers to the entire horizon. It has its functional value precisely
in not depending on determinate or already determinable actual threats.
In tum, while this attitude to reality can be maintained episodically
for longer periods, it cannot be managed indefinitely. The generalized
excitement and suspense must always be reduced, again, to the
assessment of specific factors. Put differently-specifically in the lan-
guage of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein - this means that anxiety IllUSt
again and again be rationalized into fear, both in the history of mankind
and in that of the individual. This occurs primarily, not through ex-
perience and knowledge, but rather through devices like that of the
substitution of the familiar for the unfamiliar, of explanations for the
inexplicable, of names for the unnameable. Something is 'put forward,"
so as to make what is not present into an object of averting, conjuring
6
Part I
up, mollifying, or power-depleting action. By means of names, the

identity of such factors is demonstrated and made approachable, and
an equivalent of dealings with them is generated. What has become
.identifiable by means of a name is raised~?ut o( ~~s_~~fa!llj!i~r~tyk
means of metaphor and is made- acce~s.~bIe, in terms ?!}~~s!ggi!1san~~
bY-i'~lli~g...~io(ies. Panic and pa-ralysis, as -the~i"wo'extremes of anxiety
behavior, are dissolved by the appearance of calculable magnitudes
to deal with and regulated ways of dealing with them, even if the
results of the magical and ritual quid pro quo now and then make a
mockery of the intention of gaining the favor of the powers on behalf
of man.
It is worth remembering, to present an extreme case, the sacrificial
hysteria of the Aztecs before the invasion of the Spaniards, during
which the priests waded in the blood of the ritual massacres, and wars
had to be conducted that were the fiercer the more difficult it became
to procure, from the surrounding peoples, the masses of prisoners for
sacrifice that were acceptable to the gods. And all of this in order to
save the empire from a danger that had been' proclaimed by astrology
and that was realized on the very day it was prophesied for. But at
that point there was a shortage precisely of those who had the qualities
of nobility that were needed to make them satisfactory to the gods
as sacrifices.
Anxiety is related to the unoccupied horizon of the possibilities of
what may come at one. It is only on account of this that it can appear,
in maximal magnitude, as 'existential anxiety' ['Lebensangst'l. In spite
of its biological function in separation and transition situations where
magnitudes of danger are not predefined, anxiety is never realistic.
It does not first become pathological as a phenomenon of man's recent
history; it is pathological. Consequently we don't learn anything new
when Freud says that anxiety becomes neurotic as a result of its
infantile relationship to danger, since, in anxiety, reactions are produced
that are no longer appropriate to the situation of mature individuals.
One who reacts out of anxiety or in a state of anxiety has lost the
mechanism of putting forward imagined 'authorities' [Instanzen]. The
despised formulas of bourgeois courtesy can also be an 'authority'
that is put forward, and the 'critical' destruction of which, while it
does produce the desired 'nakedness' between people encountering
one another, also deprives the weaker person, who previously never
had to be found out, of his protection.
Chapter 1
_T_h~ ~a_~~gory oX ac_~i.9ns t~at .~~E~,,~I!t.itl~q "overreaction" is described

by_ the fact that these a~.t~QIJ.~_. are comrnin~(t"bY~.R~.ople_.>,:who ,cannot
.
~n9.~i~~.~~:9_ ~~!~PE~~?E~ That holds not only for the production of
metaphors but also for their use: 'Carryings-over'd ar~ things that have
to be performed, but that must not be taken literally. The inability
to undertake substitutions or to accept them is practically identical
with the other inability to undertake the delegation of competences
to others and to accept the representation of the many by a few for
purposes of decision making. It is a rigid realism of immediacy that
is espoused by those who want to decide everything themselves, or
to participate in every decision, so as to refuse the favor of institutions
that would enable them not to have to be involved in everything
themselves. The 'art of living' - that primary skill, which has become
obsolete even as a phrase, of dealing with and husbanding oneself-
had to be acquired as a faculty for dealing with the fact that man
does not have an environment that is arranged in categories and that
can be perceived exclusively in its 'relevances' for him. To have a
world is always the result of an art, even if it cannot be in any sense
a 'universal artwork' ['Gesamtkunstwerk': Richard Wagner]. Some of this
will certainly have to be described under the heading of "work on
myt. h"
One's 'horizon' is not only the sum of the directions from which
one has to be prepared for the appearance of undefined things; it is
also the sum of the directions to which anticipation of possibilities and
reaching out toward them are oriented. Prevention is matched by
presumption [Prasumptionl. What it fills the horizon with, imaginatively
and wishfully, can lack realism as long as this does not extend to the
central matter of survival. Even in the late phenomenon of theory
there are collections of propositions that persist only by virtue of their
irrefutability and that form a halo around a core stock of the necessary
realism of propositions, the refutation of which would be lethal. Seen
from the point of view of this realism, what appears at best as a
residue of what is as yet unrefuted, or as something that, being ir-
refutable, is of no interest, is now understood only with difficulty. It
will be as a means of maintaining a position in the face of an over-
powering reality, through millenniums, that stories, which could not
be contradicted by reality, were successful.
Whatever starting point one might choose, work on the reduction
of the absolutism of reality would already have begun. Among the
8
Part I
relics that dominate our conception of the early ages of man and that
mark his image as that of the "tool maker," we can detect nothing
of what also had to be accomplished in order to make an unknown
world known, to make an unarticulated field of data surveyable. This
includes what, being beyond the horizon, is inaccessible to experience.
To fill the last horizon, as the mythical 'edge of the world,' is only to
anticipate the inceptions and degenerations of what is unfamiliar. Homo
pictor [man the painter] is not only the producer of cave paintings for
magical practices relating to hunting, he is also the creature who covers
up the lack of reliability of his world by projecting images.
The absolutism of reality is opposed by the absolutism of images
and wishes. In Totem and Taboo, Freud spoke of the "omnipotence of
thoughts" as the s~~atu~ of archaic animism. We must remember
that after the abandonment of the forest, the division of life between
caves and open hunting grounds set in. The closed space allows what
the open space prohibits: the power of the wish, of magic, of illusion,
and the preparation of effects by thought. But not only by thought.
The illusionary power of magic is less one of thought than one of
'procedure.' He who keeps to a rule whose importance and origin no
one (any longer) knows can produce a precisely determined result that
is not bound to the time and place of the procedure. In accordance
with Freud's personal interpretation of Haeckel's fundamental bio-
genetic law, the phylogenetic 'animism' that was referred to corre-
sp~nds to -2_!lt<?_g~~_e~!s= 'I?:-~~CTS_si~~~_1~ t,~e main 'Te-it'ure'-C;fh its
"over.valuation,o[one~s-,own psychica.l a5S~:.~ This is the presuppositIon
of a concept of reality that makes consciousness of it arise from an
ensuing "unmistakable protest of reality" against narcissism. It may
be that one can take a further step toward the construction of the
facts of the case by imagining the absolutism of wishes and images
as that of products of the caves, in isolation, at first, from the absolutism
of reality. The connection of the one to the other, whether one calls
it magic or cult, would only be a secondary confrontation on the basis
of an already structured, already differentiated, independent world.
In the hunting magic of his cave pictures the hunter reaches, from
his housing, out and across to the world.
I will now attempt, with caution, to introduce a clarifying example
from literature, which also originated in a situation of absolutism,
admittedly a late and artificial absolutism. In Auf den Marmorklippen
[On the marble cliffs], in 1939, Ernst Junger laid out his allusions to
9
Chapter 1
the events of the time in a mythical scenery. After the battle of Alta
Plana, which stands for the events of June 30, 1934, the narrator f>
resolved to offer resistance with spiritual forces alone. He does this

in library and herbarium. Contrary to this resolution, he says, he and
his allies sometimes "like children ... fell back onto that earlier world
in which terror rules supreme." It seemed that they had not yet
succeeded in bringing purely spiritual forces to bear. The narrator
explains this with a single sentence: "We did not yet know the full
measure of man's power. "f -- -
-thisCQuld have described, by approximation, what I have put prior

to the mythical empowerment, as its status naturalis [state of nature]:
In it man's potential power i~__s~nJ~E2=wE..z~~<:.~plg.I~g_,. __llnte.st.e!i. At the
Same-iimerhe-<artm:Vrh' of the Marmorklippen shows that everything
that man gained in the way of dominion over reality, through the
experience of his history and finally through knowledge, could not
remove the danger of sinking back-indeed, the longing to sink back-
to the level of his impotence, into archaic resignation, as it were. But
for this sinking back not only to become possible but to become the
epitome of new desires, something had to be forgotten. This forgetting
is the achievement of distance through 'work on myth' itself. It is a
necessary condition of everything that became possible on this side
of the terror, of the absolutism of reality. At the same time it is also
a necessary condition of the fact that the desire to return home to
the archaic irresponsibility of simple surrender to powers that cannot
be gainsaid does not need to be resisted and is able to penetrate to
the surface of consciousness. I see it as itself a mythical way of ex-
pressing this state of affairs when Ferenczi, in his Theory of Genitality
of 1924,g associates with the birth trauma the desire to return to the
womb, which has to content itself with symbolic fulfillment in the
sexual act.
Man is always already on this side of the absolutism of reality, but
he never entirely attains the certainty that he has reached the turning
point in his history at which the relative predominance of reality over
his consciousness and his fate has turned into the suprelnacy of the
subject. There is no criterion for this turning, for this 'point of no
return.' To those who saw themselves as beneficiaries of science and
enlightenment who were already beyond the point \vhere they could
be overtaken, the Middle Ages still seerned to belong in the category
of a primitive world of unmastcrcd and unlnastcrablc po\vers that
10
Part I
were nothing but names and addressees of helplessness. It was theo-

logical absolutism-without its mitigations in the institutions for the
administration of grace - that made the Middle Ages look dark when
seen in retrospect after the modem age's act of foundation. Even
Goethe scarcely wanted to believe Romanticism's first revisions of this
historical self-consciousness and of the image of the prehistory that
went with it. On April 21, 1831, he writes in his diary: " ... in the
centuries when man found nothing outside himself but abomination,
he had to be happy that he was sent back into himself, so that in
place of the objects, which had been taken from him, he could create
Phantoms .... "
What the viewer found entirely missing in the rediscovered Gothic
art was contemplation of nature, and consequently any trace of the
metaphysics that corresponds to that-of pantheism. But the polythe-
ism that Goethe sees in an attenuated form even in the gallery of the
saints is a way of bridging over the difficulty of being unable to be a
pantheist in these centuries, in the absence of contemplation of nature,
but being unable to do without 'phantoms.' According to the note,
the objects had been "taken from" this late 'primitive world' that
preceded Goethe's own-one only needs to substitute for this way of
putting it the idea that they hadn't been gained yet at all, to make it
possible to apply the train of thought to any early epoch of man that
hasn't been provided for yet. What remains is the setting up of images
against the abomination-the maintenance of the subject, by means
of its imagination, against the object that has not been made accessible.
What it is then possible to establish is not the presence of any fragment
of theory, however small, but rather the extent to which theory is
unnecessary-ignoring the effort with which the aesthetic metaphy-
sician, late in the day, undertakes to make it unnecessary again.
The contradiction that seems to enter the construct of the archaic
concept of reality here - absolutism of reality on the one hand,
omnipotence of ideas on the other- is repeated in the description of
dreams. Dreaming is pure impotence with respect to the content of
the dream, the complete bypassing of the subject and of his disposition
over himself, in the midst of his images, together with an extreme
disposition to anxiety; but at the same time it is the pure dominion
of wishes, which makes waking up the epitome of disappointment,
however the censors may be constituted under which the psychic
mechanism is then placed. To fly in one's dreams - Nietzsche's formula
11
Chapter 1
for something that he calls his prerogative - is the metaphor of a zero

level of realism together with the most intensive illusion of reality.
Dreams are the faithful interpreters of our inclinations, Montaigne
wrote; but we were forced to learn that in order to communicate their
message to us, the interpreters required a theoretically sophisticated
interpreter in their tum. Since our only concern here is to clarify the
supposed contradiction in the hypothetical construct of archaic 'realism,'
a slight detour to a clever aper~u of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec' s may be
permissible: "Last night I dreamed about Freud. What does that mean?"
It is only secondarily the meaning of the dream that may connect it
to the world of early men; first of all, and most importantly, the
dream gives us access to a limiting case of prostration to reality.
In his biography of Pericles, Plutarch concludes his account of how
Pericles dealt with the fear inspired by an eclipse of the sun with the
remark that the story was told even in the philosophical schools.
During the Peloponnesian War, Pericles was setting out with 150 ships
to besiege Epidaurus, and they were just ready to set sail when the
sun was suddenly extinguished. Everyone was seized with terror. Evi-
dently, in the case of this eclipse, later dated to August 3, 431, the
example of Thales of Miletus's depriving the event of its ominous
content by predicting it with the aid of theory did not have any effect.
Pericles' s way of bringing to his senses the steersman of his ship, who
didn't know which way to tum for fear, consisted in holding the man's
cloak before his eyes and, having thus put him in darkness, asking
whether he still thought he perceived a terrible disaster or an omen
of such a disaster. The seaman had to reply in the negative, and
Pericles completely freed him of fear by asking where, then, was there
any difference between what happened to him, here, and to the sun
in the other case, except that the sun was eclipsed by a larger object
than a cloak.
"This story is told in the schools of the philosophers," Plutarch
concludes, and no doubt one sees from this what mattered more to
philosophy than the admiration of the cosmos. But the anecdote's
rhetorical recoil against the vehicle of theory's prospect of success in
freeing man from fear cannot be overlooked either. For, while the
Athenian statesman thought that he was carrying out a model instance
of bringing explanation to bear, the steersman was probably already
calmed by the fact that he, to put it paradoxically, could no longer
see the eclipse, and could surrender to mere encouragement. But the
12
Part I
anecdote illustrates still more: The boundary line between myth and
logos is imaginary and does not obviate the need to inquire about the
logos of myth in the process of working free of the absolutism of
reality. Myth itself is a piece of high-carat 'work of logos.'
It may be that magic was able at first to generate the beneficent
illusion that man was able to accomplish more in relation to the
conditions of his existence than his skills could substantiate in reality.
Even before that, the directions had to be determined and named,
from which benefaction or the opposite was to be expected. Agencies
to which to address oneself had to become apprehensible, in order
for it to be possible to wring favor from them or to prevent their
disfavor. It is not mere metaphorical convenience when phenomena
are seen as results of actions. One of the fundamental patterns in
which man's history presents itself, into recorded times, is that in
which the perception of his interest in relation to reality was played
through in illusion and defended in the form of an (unrecognized)
fiction before it could even begin to become realistic. The broad field
of health -care practices provides the material to support this statement;
but in principle there is nothing different in the ritual cultivation of
forces and powers. The narrow zone of realistic behavior is always
surrounded by a field of suggestions of action and of the producibility
of results. The burden of proving where the limits of influencing the
world would be found always lay on cases of failure-and only on
those where no supplementary explanation of its causes was available
(an uncommon exception to the rule). This presumption supports an
increasingly rich pattern of 'as if behavior, whose success consisted
in its initial or permanent incontrovertibility. Mankind has supported
itself, through the greatest part of its history and of the contents of
its consciousness, on irrefutable assumptions, and perhaps - it is a
suspicion, not capable of proof- still does so.
That events were interpreted as actions is, according to Nietzche's
formulation, the distinguishing mark of all mythologies. But it is not
primarily a matter of explaining phenomena, as it appears when he
brings in causality. Urgently and early on, the interest was certainly
in the existence of powers that one could appeal to, that could be
turned away from or toward one, that were capable of being influenced
in every sense, and that were also (to a degree) dependable, as long
as this did not have to be the dependability of jealousy or enmity.
13
Chapter 1
Even Epicurus, with his removal of the world of the gods into the
intermediate spaces between the worlds, makes it possible for us to
see what tied man's interest to them, what recommended their con-
tinued existence despite even the soberest atomistic view of the world.
When he writes in the Letter to M enoiceus that it would be better to
accept the myth about the gods than to become a slave of the necessity
of the physicists, he thinks this as a result of weighing the assistance
available from each in reducing the absolutism of reality. There is as
yet no hint of Schiller's "gentle bow of necessity" whose "shot" threat-
ens man; that is a figure of beautiful resignation, which presupposes
the softening of physical by ethical lawfulness. In contrast to that, part
of the concept of ancient atomism was that it saw 'accident' as an
opportunity, at least for one who knew how to avoid the risks of
nature and remained in his 'garden,' rather than going into the wil-
derness. The selection of the garden as the home of Epicurus's school
was not an arbitrary one.
Epicurus's gods are more than tolerated and they do more than
survive. They are conceived in accordance with the ideal of the wise
man, who does not worry about the reality of the worids because he
has assessed their possibilities as not affecting him. The spaces between
the worlds, in the absolute emptiness of which the old gods of Olympus
continue their existence, are in a wayan outbidding of the cosmos
of the Platonic-Stoic lineage: They are the idea (if there can be such
a thing here) of not being affected, and being incapable of being
affected, by what the worlds are made by and made of-the complete
depletion of the power of their reality. Epicurus's wise man lives as
though he were a god, and that is only possible ... in the absence of
realism. Still, a quantum of realism is unavoidably involved in merely
having any idea of such acosmic divine beings at all. For, according
to this philosophy's concept of knowledge, the wise man could never
know what it means to live with one's back to the worlds, without
the burden of their reality, if the gods whose flying images reach him
were not really there in empty space. After this culmination of ancient
polytheism, modem pantheism will be the first doctrine to offer, again,
a solution that promises or even confirms as already accomplished
what Heine describes as "the reinstatement of man in his divine
privileges. "
Of that, if one may formulate it this way, myth could not even
dreaITI. The way in which it pursued the reduction of the absolutism
14
Part I
of reality was to distribute a block of opaque powerfulness, which

stood over man and opposite him, among many powers that are
played off against one another, or even cancel one another out. Not
only to be able to shield oneself from one power with the aid of
another, but simply to see one as always occupied and entangled with
the other, was an encouragement to man deriving from their mere
multiplicity. Seen in terms of the history of religion, it is the confining
of a diffusely distributed quality of uncanniness and unmanageability
into enclaves limited by strict sanctions.
In these, Rudolf Otto believed he had recognized "the holy" in its
original form. h In this he proceeded from the anthropological inter-
pretation of everything a priori, as taught by the N eo-Kantian schools
of Fries and Nelson. If one accepts the construction of an original
absolutism of reality, then the 'auras' [Fluidal of mana, orenda, manitou,
and wakanda, which Otto made popular, are best seen as remnants
of the aura of superior power and intractability that originally sur-
rounded the appearances of the world.
What is and remains 'taboo' would then - concentrated in itself and
pars pro toto [as a part standing for the wholel-have to represent (and
no doubt also to simulate, now and then, in the service of the status
quo) the overall tinge of an undefined unfriendliness that originally
adhered to the world. The taboo, like other strong sanctions, would
be the exaggeration, at one point, of the rejecting unwillingness with
which the world had once confronted. man. It would be, if you like,
the 'symbolic' conjuring up of that quality, serving to keep its enclosure
in reservations and its insertion into the 'interworlds' of culture present
to consciousness. In the fear or awe that is accorded to such enclaves,
the price of the domestication of the whole is paid.
One grasps man's 'policy' in dealing with a reality that is not tractable
for him at too late a point when one focuses, with the history of
religion, on "the holy," and does not perceive in it the already insti-
tutionalized mode of reduction of the absolutism of reality, of that
sheer inimicalness to life and unobligingness toward this "dilettante
of life," as Scheler called man. It is hardly an accident that Greek
myth tried to concentrate the world's alienating quality [Befremdlichkeitl
into forms, that it translated it into the optical realm, and hardly ever
alluded to the tactile aspect. Among the Gorgons, who are descended
from the sea, with its resistance to form, and from its monstrous gods
(predating even Poseidon), and who inhabit the vague edge of the
15
Chapter 1
world, beyond Oceanus [the 'world ocean'], it is especially Medusa,

with her look that kills by turning to stone, in whom unapproachability
and intolerability have been almost proverbially concentrated: Athena,
who herselfhas already moved too far from this quality in the direction
of pleasantness and friendliness to culture, has to procure the gorgoneion
[the Gorgon head on her shield] through Perseus as a reinforcement
of her. armor. In return for this the hero received her advice to approach
the Gorgon only with the aid of her reflection in his metal shield.
The fine arts have achieved only meager results in relation to the
original terrors. As a result they have fed the secret idea that behind
the verbal heaping up of hideousnesses, a jealousy of an entirely
original beauty might have hidden itself What is a bridge to aesth-
eticization and what is an apology for it is not a question that will be
decidable. At the end of the process stands admission into the canon.
When Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria acquires the high relief of
Medusa from the Palazzo Rondanini in Rome, Goethe receives a cast
as a present and conveys his thanks with the words: "For almost forty
years now I have felt the absence of what was once the familiar sight
of an image that hints at the highest concepts, such as developed in
the ancient world from its daily presence." He had been made "ex-
ceedingly happy," he says, by receiving the replica of "this magnificent
treasure." Before him stood the long-desired "work of art from a
mythical primeval time," which, although at other times it had been
"fearsome on account of its fatal effects," appeared "beneficent and
wholesome" to him.
For Goethe the head of Medusa is the triumph of classicism. It
stands for the overcoming of the terror of the primeval times by means
no longer of myth or of religion, but of art. When he possesses this
"ardently hoped-for presence" on the Frauenplan,i it has already be-
come a distant memory that in Rome he had lived opposite the palazzo
of the Rondanini and had often seen the marble mask, "of remarkable
excellence"-a sight "that by no means turned one to stone, but rather
enlivened one's artistic sense exceedingly and magnificently," as he
writes to ZeIter on January 21, 1826.
This is a unique paradigm of the 'work on myth' that may have
begun with the 'apotropaic' [hindering, averting] accomplishment of
naming. Franz Rosenzweig spoke of the "name's breaking into the
chaos of the unnamed," though the word chaos may conform too much
to what is familiar from myths and cosmologies, as though these were
16
Part I
fossils embodying the history of the human race. However late that
may already be which we can grasp with the aid of the names that
have been handed down, it is a piece of mastery of- of giving shape
to and bringing into view-something that went before and that is
beyond our reach. What was produced can be called "the capacity to
be addressed." It prepares the way for the exercise of influence through
magic, ritual, or worship. And again, in the interpretation of the in-
stitutions' practices, and rituals, the power that they are directed at
becomes entangled in a story, which naturally is the story of the
greater possibility, at least occasionally, of getting along with it. Every
story gives an Achilles' heel to sheer power. Even the 'world' gave its
creator a need, when his dogma had hardly been completed, for a
justification of the fact that his world acquired a history.
The historical power of myth is not founded in the origins of its
contents, in the zone from which it draws its materials and its stories,
but rather in the fact that, in its procedure and its 'form,' it is no longer
something else. I would never call it the "faith of the Hellenes"j that
Homer's and Hesiod's gods are a 'sequel' to other gods, who stand
behind them or have been merged into them. There is room for
discussion of Edvard Lehmann's formula that myth was destined to
be overcome, although I fear that it contains an unfortunate deeper
meaning. But it will be incomparably more important to describe myth
itself as already the manifestation of an overcoming, of the gaining
of a distance, of a moderation of bitter earnestness.
In connection with transformations of the possibility of 'getting
along with' power, one should think not only of attitudes of reverence
and seeking favor but also of those of provocation, of forcing com-
mitment, and even of malicious cunning, like that of Prometheus and
of the 'trickster' figures known all over the world. To make the god
e~dure curses, mockery, and blasphemous ceremonies is to feel out
and possibly to displace the limits on which one can rely. To provoke
the savior to the point where he comes - to intensify the wickedness
so much that he finds that he can no longer justify making the world
wait for him-to test, through sin, whether the commitment of grace
is absolute: all of these belong to the repertory of ways of coercing a
po\ver that it is all-important to make sure of In Gnostic circles troops
of unspontaneous sinners have always tried orgies of infamy as means,
following the rules of the god of this world, to stimulate their 'foreign
Chapter 1
god' to carry out his eschatological deed. One who discovers the law
of increasing misery [Verelendung] sees everything driving toward the
point at which the only thing left is for everything to become different.
Frivolity is only a weak derivative of all this, a means of anthro-
pomorphic relaxation of tension vis-a -vis myth: One can do this, or
say that, without being struck by lightning. It is the first stage of
'Enlightenment' satire, of rhetorical secularization as a stylistic technique
employed by a spirit that is not yet confident of its enlightened status.
Once again: In relation to the sacrosanct, before it has been declared
dead, one can act as though it didn't exist without being fetched by
the devil. That Goethe's devil can no longer fetch Faust as Marlowe's
did is another demonstration of 'work on myth' with a proof, favorable
to the modem age, of the goodwill of powers that have been conjured
up. The final outcome, for the paragon of the 'virtues' of his age, was
good. Finally, to reenact the pattern, the revolutionary only needs to
hang on the tail of a police horse in order to prove to his hesitant
comrades that it doesn't kick and doesn't bite-it is trained specifically
to do nothing.
On account of their immorality, the mythical gods of the Greeks
were criticized by the philosophers and were excluded from association
with reason. But describing them as immoral is only a late reflection
on a kind of behavior that, though not entirely arbitrary and im-
penetrable, cannot be measured by human standards: [a reflection
that says that] at least frivolity should not have it easy. Still, this \vas
the front on which the advocates of reason felt themselves to be
fundamentally and definitively superior. In their rhetoric, the \vriters
of the early centuries of Christianity anticipated much that the Enlight-
enment of the modem age was to allege and bring into play against
their own position. "Should one laugh or become angry," writes Ter-
tullian with linguistically effective disdain, in his To the Heathen, at the
beginning of the third century A.D., "when beings are regarded as
divine that act in ways in which even men may not act?" That is the
shortest formula for the way myth is viewed, looking back, by those
who profit from its supposed absurdity.
It is, in addition, the forrnula of a complete lack of understanding
of \vhat had been accolTIplished by the pantheon. In this respect, also,
the arrogance of the new epoch anticipated what was again to be
inflicted on it by the epoch succeeding it. Nothing is lnore instructive
than to observe the repeated performance of the 'final overcorning'
18
Part I
of the absurd and the abstruse in history, from which one can learn
at least that it is not so easy to 'overcome.'
Gods-they were indeed, if one follows Tertullian's grim humor,
such as men should not be, but before that they were also such as men
could not be. Only late in the day is it their immorality that finally
qualifies them for satyr plays and comedy, for the enjoyment of their
not unrestricted power: Not only do they need the cunning deception
of metamorphosis for purposes of seduction, but they also prevent
one another from carrying out their will and their whims without
restraint. This already holds for the exposition of the initial situation
in the Iliad, in all the nuances of the distribution of powers that the
prior stories introduce into the current ones.
The priest of Apollo, grieved by the abduction of his daughter,
urges his god to punish the Achaeans, who consequently have to take
the spoil away from Achilles again, to his wrath, and restore it to the
priest. The offended Achilles turns to his mother, Thetis, onetime bride
of Zeus, whom Zeus, giving her up, had given in marriage to Peleus.
Let her urge the Olympian to punish the Achaeans, because they had
deprived her son of something on behalf of his son's priest. The mother-
son relationship between Thetis and Achilles succeeds in outweighing
the father-son relationship between Zeus and Apollo. And it is certainly
stronger than Zeus's relationship to Hera, who as the protectress of
marriage is angry with the Trojans over the abduction of Helen and
does not want to let the Greeks suffer injury. Still another factor plays
a role here: While Hera is powerful in her incontestable position, she
was a participant in an old conspiracy with Poseidon and Athena
against Zeus. On that occasion Thetis had saved Zeus's power by
bringing up the hundred-handed giant Briareus, exultant in his glory.
However the relative strata in the history of religion and the location
of cults that lie behind this initial situation may have been established,
in the stage of reduction [of the absolutism of reality] that has been
arrived at in epic poetry the separation of powers is already cause for
a merriness that is entirely unrelated to its consequences in the outcome
of the war between the Trojans and the Achaeans.
The Enlightenment, which did not want to be the Renaissance again
and considered the contest between ancient and modem to have been
decided, did not forgive myth its frivolities any more than it forgave
Christian theology the seriousness of its dogmatism. It sought to hit
the latter indirectly, by way of the former; for instance, in the dispute
19
Chapter 1
about the falling silent of the ancient oracles at the beginning of the
Christian era, which was settled by Fontenelle in a manner that set
literary standards as well. Still more in the God who had demanded
of Abraham the sacrifice of his only son, the child of his old age, and
only stopped Abraham from carrying it out when his obedience had
been demonstrated, the Enlightenment saw the counterpart of the
sacrifice of Iphigenia that was demanded (but also carried through)
by Agamemnon. For the moral critique of myth, as of the Bible, it
mattered little that in the second case the goddess Artemis had with-
drawn the maiden who was dedicated to her, or that in the first case
God had recognized Abraham's obedience and substituted the insti-
tution of the sacrifice of animals for that of humans. Decisively more
important is the fact that the Father-God had been, indirectly, the
target of the critique, and a target that it hit-the Father-God who
was also supposed to be capable, according to dogma, of the incredible
act of having the sacrifice of his own son brought to him to compensate
for a relatively modest crime involving fruit.
The Enlightenment saw and evaluated all this from the perspective
of the terminus ad quem [the point at which the process terminates]; it
was incapable of turning its attention to the terminus a quo [the point
from which the process takes its departure], and it paid for this in-
capacity with its defeat by historicism. k The Enlightenment examined
the favorite instance of its moral critique of the biblical God, the scene
of sacrifice on Mount Moriah, as an instance of almost completed
immorality, an immoral act that was already accomplished in principle.
A reversal of the temporal perspective would have made it possible
to see here a boundary, at which something that had been possible
and customary through millenniums is definitively discontinued pre-
cisely by the divine will, in contradicting itself, exhibiting the before
and after in one scene.
Nothing could have made so impressive what was no longer supposed
to be possible as the continued telling of this story across the generations,
generations that may have been ready again and again to seek the
more weighty and more effective sacrifice for their God as soon as
he refused what they expected, did not fulfill his obligations under
the covenant. Behind the sacrifice in Aulis, too, \vhich extorted a
favorable wind for the Greek fleet in its voyage to Troy, stands the
history (as long as that of the human race) of human sacrifice, a history
that is ended here by the goddess's intervention and the last traces
20
Part I
of which are not absent even from a tr.adition that has repeatedly
been purged as a result of the abhorrence of later generations. The
Iphigenia who is transferred by Artemis to the land of the Taurians
still participates in human sacrifices there, as a priestess in the goddess's
temple-which directly characterizes this as something that is now
only supposed to be possible in the distant land of the Scythians.
Herodotus described Iphigenia as herself a divinity to the Taurians,
a divinity to whom they bring the abominable sacrifices of shipwrecked
Greek sailors and prisoners of war. Consequently it is an act of Hellenic
domestication when Orestes and Pylades are supposed to have carried
off the wooden statue of the Taurian Artemis, and Iphigenia is supposed
to have helped them. She explains to the king, Thoas, that the goddess
did not want these men as sacrifices, but wants a gift of lambs instead.
In connection with the function of institutional renunciation of human
sacrifice, the Spartan version of the myth is instructive, according to
which Orestes brought the Taurian statue of Artemis to Sparta, where
he became king; the idol brought human sacrifice along with it, until
the giver of Sparta's constitution, Lycurgus, put an end to it at the
price, however, of still offering to the goddess's thirst for blood at
least its smell, by means of the flogging of the Spartan boys. The
place of the offering up of human life is taken by the offering up of
an absolute obedience, both in the history of the patriarchs, as a
prelude to the giving of the Law in the Sinai and to Paul's concept of
faith, and in the Spartan state myth. The negation of human sacrifice,
as a restriction on unchecked efforts to gain the favor of divinity, could
only be institutionalized if it was possible to avoid the appearance of
falling short of the threshold of the divine requirements. Something
less than what had hitherto been offered could always be discredited
as an insult to the god.
There is something in the definition that Wilhelm Wundt self-con-
fidently proposed in the second volume of his Vo·lkerpsychologie [Eth-
nopsychologyl of 1904: "Myth is affect that is converted into idea and
action. "I Regarding 'affect' as an unspecific potential, from the trans-
formation of which an entire sphere of culture arises, is in keeping
with the orientation toward energy-ideas that was common at the
time. Freud's concept of "sublimation," which was introduced in 1908,
follows the same guiding metaphor. But in his definition Wundt is not
very concerned with what, as a given quantity, he entitles "affect,"
which for him is only the "other side" of a balance of energy. Only
21
Chapter 1
in 191 7 did Rudolf Otto decode the affect side and equip it with
nomenclature of lasting effectiveness.
But this nomenclature also involves the danger of containing from
the beginning the phenomenon that is supposed to be explained. If,
instead, one takes 'affect' as already despecified agitation, then its
indefiniteness turns out to be related to that hypothetical status naturalis
of the absolutism of reality. Affect is then a condition of paying attention,
which had to take over the position of a habitual adaptive system of
challenge and performance in order to make possible, in the process
of anthropogenesis, the change of environment preceding the emer-
gence of man. Attention, which is the difference between perception
and observation, is stabilized most of all by affect.
Even when it is still a matter of being on one's guard for the invisible
and evading it by observing its rules, affect is the inclusive bracket
that unites partial actions that work against the absolutism of reality.
Intentionality-the coordination of parts into a whole, of qualities into
an object, of things into a world-may be the 'cooled-off aggregate
condition of such early accomplishments of consciousness, accom-
plishments that had led the way out of the bracketing together of
stimulus and response and that were at the same time the outcome
of this exodus. To that extent there is something in the classical idea
that emotion is the unclarity of the mind in the process of feeling its
way forward. This schema of accomplishment is filled not only by
sensation and perception but also by the names, figures, and stories,
the rituals and machinations that are bracketed together by the one
still-undefined affective condition of overwhelming power that Rudolf
Otto entitles the "numinous."
To speak of beginnings is always to be suspected of a Inania for
returning to origins. Nothing wants to go back to the beginning that
is the point toward which the lines of what we are speaking of here
converge. On the contrary, everything apportions itself according to
its distance from that beginning. Consequently it is more prudent to
speak of the "pluperfect" lVorvergangenheit, the past's past] rather than
of "origins." This pluperfect is not that of an omnipotence of \vishes,
which would have submitted to compromise with reality, as 'realism,'
only after colliding with the hostility of what does not bow to wishes.
There we can only imagine the single absolute experience that exists:
that of the superior power of the Other.
22
Part I
The Other is not yet by preference the other One. m Only when the
former is interpreted with the aid of the latter, when the neuter is
made accessible by means of the metaphor of the alter ego, does a
world exegesis begin that involves man, who comes to know, in the
story of the Other One, who comes to be known. All at once man
sees a piece of nature as having the character of the hunting or grazing
ground of this Other One and conceives this as a possible confrontation,
which is avoided or sought through one's behavior toward the dominion
of the Other One and which obliges one to engage in compensatory
actions, restitutions, efforts to compel good conduct, efforts to obtain
fa vor, and exchange of gestures. He who touches or crosses the horizon
of the Other One encounters him with the aid of his name, to which
he has delegated his presence.
The name that functions magically must be unintelligible, and in
the Gnostic art myth-indeed, in the undercurrent of magic in the
modem age-it still stems from out-of-the-way or dead languages.
The little importance that is attached, in the study of the history of
religions, to allegorical names of gods, which are treated as later
inventions, at which the Romans, above all, with their relationship to
myth which was not autochthonous in any case, were to become
masters-this low importance is probably not always justified. The
allegorical personifactions are precious for the insight into the myth's
mode of functioning that they illustrate: Clementia [Clemency] is in-
vented in order to hinder Justitia Uustice] in its sheer logical consistency.
Such names, pulled out of the 'and so forth,' are fitted into the system
(a system that is already fitted together) of the separation of powers;
they are obedience to the 'Pantheon' as a guiding idea.
Once the place of the 'Other' is taken by the 'Other One,' the work
of physiognomic comprehension of the latter begins. That is also, in
fact especially, accomplished by the typification of an animal form,
which has familiar modes of behavior and characteristics. These lay
down the ways in which to deal with him. The construction of his
story initiates the ritualization of the modes of behavior of all the
participants. The cult is the effort of the weaker partner to be exemplary
in this. The Other, having become the Other One, must have his own
'others,' and has them in other gods, including the gods of other
people.
As soon as a god acquires something like a 'character' (in the language
of philosophy: attributes that commit him to his 'essence '), the other
23
Chapter 1
gods already become potentially superfluous for the purpose of defining

his reliability as the limitation of his power. His identity is then described
as his "fidelity," which sets his power free as an executive power over
against others, who do not identify themselves with him and with his
partners in his covenant. He is trustworthy on his conditions, consti-
tutional according to his law, by which he has committed himself even
in the use of his power. This state of affairs entails his uniqueness,
and that uniqueness excludes the possibility that another story could
be told about him in relation to other people, apart from the story
that he shares with the people for whom he is responsible and whom
he has chosen.
Such a god of fidelity can watch 'jealously' over the exclusiveness
of his acceptance and dominion; to withdraw oneself or anything from
that dominion becomes an absolute offense against the god himself.
That he is the only one becomes the first article of his 'dogma.' The
ability to enter into a covenant is the foundation of his history with
men; one who observes his conditions can be sure of enjoying what
he promises. Doubt first arises in the form of the question whether
the fulfillment of these conditions is humanly possible. That is the
route from the God of Noah with the rainbow, and the God of Abraham
who forgoes the sacrifice, to the God of Paul, whose Law had been
impossible to comply with and makes a new form of constitutional
lawlessness necessary.
To define, within a first sketch of the ways in which the early
experience of superior power is digested, a limiting-case concept of
the singularization of this experience can be understood as a task of
'free variation,' as a piece of phenomenology. Among the attributes
of that Other One, as a 'being,' superior power could be combined
with unconditional sympathy with man. The proposition that the New
Testament's First Letter of John uses to express this, that "God is
love," would be the basis for the inseparable combination of the ex-
perience of superior power with the certainty of salvation. If one seeks,
next, to determine how the conjunction with love, as a restraint that
power places on itself, can be raised to the level of certainty, then
there emerges - prior to any actual dogma of any theology whatever-
a compelling need to go beyond the model of covenant and contract
to an absolute realism of the commitment of divine favor to men.
The definitive and irrevocable welcomeness of men to their God would
find its realistic sanction in that God's himself appearing on both sides
24
Part I
of the relationship: as pure superior power and as pure impotence.

This prescription, which can be arrived at a priori, was filled by the
history of Christian dogma, with the Christological immersion of the
Son of God in human nature.
Christology tells the story that necessarily has to have happened in
order to attribute to God an absolute interest in the 'human interest,'
indissolubly and without regard to the mutuality of a contract that is
fulfilled. It is true that Christianity's taking over of ancient metaphysics
forbade theology to think the fundamental idea of the absolute interest
through to the end, because it had to accept the superimposed idea
of the essential autarky and untroubledness of gods. But the obstruc-
tiveness of the central idea of Christianity to this postulate breaks
through all the seams of the dogmatic system. For medieval Scho-
lasticism, an example of this is the topic of 'sacraments': They are the
means, granted by God himself, of coercing him - the execution of
his absolute interest, as against his will, however else that will may
be motivated. No theory of myth, if it is meant to show how to
understand what has happened, can lose sight of this perfect con-
vergence of Christianity with myth (despite the suspension of its means).
If anyone should take this interpretation of core theological elements
of the Christian tradition amiss, I would have to reply that it is only
under the imposed rule of pagan metaphysics-which is not myth
itself, but its transcription- that one can be prohibited from being
impressed by the granting to man of the devices of which theology
talked for so long and of which it would always have to talk when
the issue is man's self-assertion against his god with the aid of his god
(or, for the mystic, his self-assertion even as the one who has become
god, against the god who has not come into being). The point of this
anticipatory defense is to make it possible to note here already that
Goethe's "extraordinary saying"n will playa central role in the de-
velopment of the scheme of this book.
Besides, the metaphysics that had to restrain Christian theology
from pursing the logic of the idea of God's absolute interest in man
arose from a satiety with myth and from a defense against regression
into it. Medieval theology was not able to enjoy the great idea, invented
in passing by Paul, that God had parted with himself and taken on
the form of a servant. It had to think about the preservation of the
substance, of the essence, of the natures that it caused to be combined.
But a suffering Omnipotence, an Omniscience that was ignorant of
25
Chapter 1
the date set for the Last Judgment, an Omnipresence that was drawn
into history at a specific time and place-measured against the standard
of the philosophical disdain for myth, these were instructions for thought
that were difficult to combine. That is why this God, to whom ancient
meta physics was to render such great services, for his part had no
success with that metaphysics and in relation to the gods whom it
had disciplined.
When Thales of Miletus had declared the exhaustion of the mythical
mode of thought with his obscure saying that "everything is full of
gods," that had become a kind of concluding statement for the history
that followed. Though new gods, from distant places, might still tum
up and be tried out, still there was nothing essential left to be added
to the stock of people's expectations. Paul will notice this when in his
wonderfully inventive and yet unsuccessful missionary address to the
Athenians he points to the inscription dedicating one of their altars
"to an unknown God," proposing to make up the supposed deficiency
himself, with his god [Acts 1 7:23]. What he discovers is that the ad-
vertised care for the cult of this "unknown god" is an incidental result
of the pedantry of a state cult overseen by officials, rather than a
pious zealousness that doesn't want to let even the least of the gods
be forgotten. It was like the proof, after some centuries' delay, of that
obscure saying of Thales.
What Paul hadn't noticed was that the inscription lacked the definite
article. The God whom he had imagined as the unknown one would
only have been one further god, like many before him and even after
him. So Philostratus's version, in his life of Apollonius, also says that
in Athens there were "altars of unknown gods," in the same double
plural. Paul's speech on the Areopagus is one of the magnificent his-
torical misunderstandings that aid our comprehension Inore than the
missionary successes do. The apostle leaves Athens without being able,
as he did elsewhere, to leave behind him a congregation.
If one of the functions of rnyth is to convert numinous indefiniteness
into nominal definiteness and to make what is uncanny familiar and
addressable, then this process leads ad absurdum [to absurdity] when
"everything is full of gods." From that situation no further conclusion
can be arrived at by a finite procedure, and no result can be expected
beyond counting up and having named [the godsl. That could have
been foreseen to a large extent already frorn the case of Hesiod's
Theogony. The power of genera ting irnages, the irnagining of figures
26
Part I
and histories, the systematics of their relationships with one another

were not able to measure up to the abundance of names. If Thales
had wanted to explain why myth was no longer sufficient, inasmuch
as its outcome was a plenitude of gods, then the philosophy that he
brought in would not have been something that pushed destructively
into the sphere of myth's full vigor, but instead would have been
called for precisely by virtue of the demonstration that myth had
fulfilled its function.
It is not an accident that the anecdotal, improbable tradition makes
the protophilosopher take over the office that myth too had held: that
of discussing and, if not explaining, at least depleting the power of
unfamiliar and uncanny phenomena. The prediction of a solar eclipse,
which is ascribed to Thales, goes beyond the covering of the event
with names and stories. It reveals for the first time the capacity of
theory-so much more effective in 'warding off-to show, by means
of foreknowledge, that the extraordinary is normal, that it is governed
by a rule. Even as an invention, the nexus between the protophilosopher
and the solar eclipse would have to be admired, because it would
have been only too accurate in its representation of the replacement
of one heterogeneous form of attitude to the world by another.
Theory is the better adapted mode of mastering the episodic tremenda
[terrors] of recurring world events. But leisure and dispassion in viewing
the world, which theory presupposes, are already results of that mil-
lenniums-long work of myth itself, which told of the monstrous as
something that is far in the past and has been forced back to the edge
of the world. What we find occurring in Thales' obscure saying is not
a zero point of reason's self-encouragement, but rather the perception
of a long -accomplished setting free of the world observer.
In this case Aristotle's hypothesis that philosophy began with wonder
and that it then progressed from puzzles that were close at hand to
those relating to small things and great things requires correction. This
hypothesis has been gladly heard in the tradition. Man's natural vo-
cation for knowledge was supposed to have proclaimed itself in wonder
as the consciousness of his lack of knowledge. Myth and philosophy
would then have come from one root. By analogy to philosophos [wisdom-
loving], Aristotle constructs the term philomythos [myth-loving], so as to
be able to relate the philosopher's predilection for what is wonderful
to myth, since after all myth itself is composed of wonderful things. o
The philosopher has something left over for myth because it is com-
27
Chapter 1
posed of what is also supposed to constitute the attraction of theory.

But more than that he does not have.
It is true that myth becomes material for exegesis and allegorical
interpretation, just as it had become the material of tragedy, but it
does not itself become an appropriate procedure for dealing with what
had given rise to wonder. The classical 'disinformation' that is contained
in the formula "from mythos to logos "P and that still lies innocently
dormant in Plato's indecision between myth and logos is complete
where the philosopher recogni~es in myth only the identity of the
objects for which he believes he has found the definitive mode of
treatment. The mischief of that obvious historical formula lies in the
fact that it does not permit one to recognize in myth itself one of the
modes of accomplishment of logos.
That the course of things proceeded "from mythos to logos" is a
dangerous misconstruction because we think that we assure ourselves
by it that somewhere in the distant past the irreversible 'spring forward'
[FortsprungJ took place that determined that something had been put
far behind us and that from then on only 'steps forward' [Fortschritte
"progresses"J had to be executed. But was the spring really between
the 'myth' that had said that the earth rests on the ocean or rises out
of it and the 'logos' that had translated this into the so much paler
universal formula that everything comes out of water and accordingly
is composed of it? The comparability of these formulas supports the
fiction that in both cases it was a question of the same interest, only
of fundamentally different means by which to pursue it.
Myth had hardly defined the philosopher's objects, but it had defined
the standard of achievements that he could not fall short of. Whether
he had loved or despised myth, he had to fulfill demands that had
been set up by it because they had been satisfied by it. To surpass
them might be a matter of other norms that theory would produce
immanently by extrapolation from its real or supposed successes, as
soon as it should be successful in moderating expectations. But before
that the postmythical epoch is under pressure to accomplish what the
epoch preceding it had claimed or even only pretended to accomplish.
Theory sees in myth an ensemble of answers to questions, such as it
is itself, or wants to be. That forces it, while rejecting the answers, to
acknowledge the questions. Thus even the mistaken interpretations
that an epoch gives to the one preceding it become an obligation for
it to understand itself as the con~ection of a failed attempt to deal
28
Part I
with the real issue. By 'reoccupying' identical systematic positions it

avoids or seeks to avoid letting the longing gaze of its contemporaries
turn back to the gods of the Egypt that they have left behind. q
Moses comes down from the mountain with tables inscribed by
God and encounters the golden calf of deprivation of familiar idols.
What he had to do and did do was to expand the Law into a full-
time employment that pushed aside all images, into an aggregate of
minutely detailed life regulations, into the fulfilling 'praxis' (which is
craved again and again) that does not allow past states to return.
Describing this form of fulfillment, one could make Paul say, in a
modification of that obscure saying ofThales ofMiletus, that everything
was full of laws. The observation of these laws destroyed respect for
them; that is Paul the Pharisee's problem in the Letter to the Romans.
If we look back on the multiplicity of the historically accumulated
theories of the origin of religion, they sort themselves out into two
main types. The first is represented by Feuerbach, for whom the
divinity is nothing but man's self-projection into heaven, his temporary
representation in a foreign medium, through \vhich his self-concept
is enriched and becomes capable of retraction from its interim state
of projection. The second is represented by Rudolf Otto, for whom
God and the gods arise from an a priori and homogeneous original
sensation of the 'holy,' in which awe and fear, fascination and world
anxiety, uncanniness and unfamiliarity are secondarily combined. Must
one not also expect both theories to have their corresponding phe-
nomena, which just haven't been separated, descriptively, by the name
"religion" ?
In that case the origin of polytheism would not be from what
originally belongs to man, but from what is originally foreign, which
even in its later anthropomorphism is still on the path of laborious
approach and subjection to discipline, after initially being brought out
of its native undefinedness and into the most rough-and-ready dim-
inution of power by means of functional division. Only the God of
monotheism, then, would be that Feuerbach God, which is something
that is already evident from the fact that unlike the many gods, who
only as it were fill up the world, he occupies man or even tyrannizes
him internally. Because he is like man and because the development
of man's self-consciousness depends on him, his relationship to man
has the character of the 'narcissism of small differences,' where a
jealous attention is paid to dotting i's and crossing t's. This relationship
29
Chapter 1
of 'being made in the image of ... ' is recognizably different from the
beautiful anthropomorphousness, with its invitation to artistic em-
bodiment, of the Olympian gods. In them there is always a remainder
of the originally foreign element, which had laboriously arrived at and
put aside animal form, taking on human form as a mere gesture of
friendliness, the better to let humanlike stories be told of them, but
never entering into serious rivalry with man, any more than man does
with them. For that, to be a god, in the language of the Greeks, meant
too little.
The pure representation of opposition to myth is, in Aristotle's
rnetaphysics, the unmoved mover, who was to make such a great
impression on Christian Scholasticism because he seemed to fulfill all
the conditions under which the existence of a God would be demon-
strable. His unmoved state also epitomizes his lack of interest in the
world. His autarkic immersion in theory puts an end to all division
of powers and all power problematics by the simple act of omitting
their precondition: the attributes of action, of volition, of a desire to
have an effect. It is this God, entirely engaged in 'theoretical' con-
templation of himself, who in the Scholastic system will determine
the quality of the human goal of salvation as well: as the final pure
theory of the visio beatifica [beatific vision]. The epoch-making mis-
understanding according to which this could be the conceptual-sys-
tematic form of the biblical God is almost incomprehensible, since,
after all, autarky is the exact opposite of what was supposed to make
the lengths to which this God went in saving man not only intelligible
but also credible.
In a fine symmetry with Thales' s concluding sentence of the mythical
epoch, Nietzsche, at the other end of history, as it were, spoke the
concluding sentence of satiety with the dogmatic God of Christianity:
"Almost two millenniums and not a single new god!" And to explain
his disappointment at the sterility of what had once been a flourishing
capacity of man: "And how many new gods are still possible!" These
two sentences designate a new threshold situation that, seen as a need,
comes under the heading of "remythicization." What makes Nietzsche's
suggestive observation alarming is the further consideration that the
new gods would not have to have the names and the stories of the
old ones again, and would exercise their superior power in unknown
ways. Do we feel the danger that lies in such a generous promise of
30
Part I
something totally different, from the mouth of the man who affirmed
the eternal recurrence of the same?
Myth defocuses the gods' interest in man. According to the story
of Prometheus, the mere toleration of man in nature is the result of
the vanquishing of Zeus by Prometheus's invincibility. In spite of He-
siod's partiality for the final world ruler, in his work too the fact is
dimly apparent that the latest set of gods accepted man's existence
only with reluctance. The organizer of the mythical material vacillates
between, on the one hand, ascribing the favor of man's survival to
Zeus's generosity and justice, and, on the other hand, extracting from
the course of the history of the gods the elements of an existential
guarantee for man. To that extent the myth of Prometheus in the
Theogony and that of the ages of the world in the Erga [Works and
Days] are closely related. It had evidently been a different generation
of gods with whom man in the golden age was able to do what in
the meantime had come to be prohibited: to break bread. But the
poet also recognizes a sort of increasing maturity in Zeus's behavior
as sovereign. This occurs between the futile punishment of Prometheus
for his assistance to mankind, and the establishment of law and pro-
hibition of force, which the poet praises. Only these make Zeus into
the ultimate authority in a reality that can carry the title of "cosmos."
Now it is man who, by his origin, still belongs to the age of Cronus
and the Titans and projects into the new god's sphere of legality like
a piece of untamed nature, always inclining toward the use of force.
It is necessity that forces him to submit to the laws of nature and the
requirements of work - even to the rules of conflict as the agon-
instead of this condition being Zeus's revenge for the illegitimate oc-
cupation of his [Zeus's] nature by the creature of the Titans.
This Olympian of Hesiod becomes the epitome of the ordering of
human existence. For man must adapt his relationship to reality to
the given conditions, rather than following his heterogeneous nature.
He does it by necessity in the regulated relationship of work as the
fundamental form in which he comes to terms with nature. The
trustworthiness of the cosmos and of its lawgiver is shown by the fact
that he gives a dependable reality the form of time. One can only do
the right thing if there is a right time for it.
The god' s disfavor remains - he is not moralized; but his disfavor
has been reduced to a pattern that becomes discernible for man.
Hesiod, the singer, is able, following the instruction of his muses, to
Chapter 1
proclaim the distribution of favorable and unfavorable days for par-

ticular kinds of work. Thus man becomes a beneficiary of a form of
order, without being its legitimate focus.
Myth allows man to live, by depleting superior power; for man's
happiness, it has no images. If there are more daring forms of existence
than the peasant's, this is because of the striving to obtain a better
life, beyond the mere securing of survival. That is the way Hesiod
sees it when he describes the peasant who undertakes, on the side, a
little seafaring on the Aegean, as venturing into the less certain do-
minion of the earthshaker, Poseidon.
It is not the action of seafaring itself that, as sacrilegious presumption,
relieves the god of the charge of capricious persecution; instead, the
mythical idea is one of competences, precincts, territories. As a seafarer,
man crosses one of these boundaries, goes over into the precinct of
another god who, while he would have to submit to the will of Zeus,
is free, in the absence of any expression of that will, to follow his own
inclination. The sea, of all the realities of the Hellenic world, is the
least integrated into the 'cosmos.' The other side of the coin of the
division of powers is that man cannot construct a homogeneous re-
lationship to the world, and must cross boundaries of forms of power,
too, under the stimulus of his appetites and wishes.
There is a measure of unseriousness in myth, of frivolity. Even
Hesiod, who takes pains to make the image of god reliable, has difficulty
describing a Zeus who establishes conditions and respects the obser-
vation of them. He had before him the embittered complaint of Aga-
memnon in the Iliad, who announces a forced return home after the
nine-year-Iong siege of Troy and accuses Zeus of breaking his promise
because he let Thetis persuade him to favor the Trojans. And this god
could not even be offended by referring to his fickleness, his kake apate,
wicked deception. No lightning struck the speaker. The theological
defect of divine faithlessness did not exist here.
Hesiod's defense of Zeus keeps to the level of the minimum: When
a person strictly obeys his rules of the correct work at the correct
time, he retains a naked, miserable, and indigent existence. Only if
one sees that after Zeus's original desire to destroy the Titan's creatures
this was already a concession and the essence of Prometheus's whole
accomplishment-only then does one see, in relief, what myth grants
to man and what it denies to him. To accept no gift from gods is
Prometheus's warning to his brother. To accept gifts means to go
32
Part I
beyond the realm of lawful order and .to abandon oneself to favor
and benefaction. That is the core of the myth of Pandora as it appears
to Hesiod. Zeus has Pandora, the artificial woman, fitted up and passed
to the unsuspecting Epimetheus, who has forgotten his brother's
.
warnIng.
Zeus does not let loose the evils themselves over mankind, but only
Pandora's dowry of curiosity, which assists Zeus's cunning. Thus her
fate cannot be directly blamed on Zeus - here is one source of the
stream of European theodicies, of the exoneration of the gods and of
God by man. Such exoneration becomes seriously necessary only when
the origin and condition of the world have to be entirely ascribed to
God and would put his wisdom and goodness in question. That is
then one of the ways in which man seeks to make himself indispensable
to God - even if it is only as the sinner who drew the evils onto the
world, and not yet as the subject of the history whose detours have
to help the God-in-the-process-of-becomingr to final consciousness.
From this perspective it becomes evident that theodicy and - in its
'reoccupation' - the speculative philosophy of history finally fulfill
myth's most secret longing not only to moderate the difference in
power between gods and men and deprive it of its bitterest seriousness
but also to reverse it. As God's defender, as the subject of history,
man enters the role in which he is indispensable. It is not only for
the world that, as its observer and actor, indeed as the producer of
its 'reality,' he cannot be imagined as absent, but also indirectly, by
"vay of this role in the world, for God as well, whose 'fortune' ['Cluck']
is now suspected of lying in man's hands.
Notes
a. Franz Kafka, Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston (New
York: Schocken, 1977), p. 242 (translation slightly revised).
b. Anxiety, here and throughout this discussion, is used to translate Angst, and should be
understood in the strong sense in which it is used in psychiatry, as "intense fear or dread
lacking an unambiguous cause or a specific threat" (American Heritage Dictionary). Its well-known
use by Kierkegaard and Heidegger is no doubt also relevant.
c. Vorgeschoben, literally, "pushed forward."
d. Ubertragungen. Note that a 'metaphor' is literally a "carried-over" use of a term.

33
Chapter 1
e. June 30, 1934, was the day of the Rohm putsch, when Hitler had many leaders of the SA
and the Nazi movement murdered, inaugurating the use of overt terror as an instnlment of
Nazi government.
f. Ernst Jiinger, On the MarbLe CLiffs, trans. Stuart Hood (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1947),
p. 59.
g. S. Ferenczi, Versuch ehzer GenitaLtheorie (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag,

1924); translated by H. A. Bunker as ThaLassa; A Theory rif GenitaLit)l (New York: Norton, 1963).
h. Rudolf Otto, Das HeiLige. Uber das IrrationaLe in der Idee des GiittLichen und sein Verhd.Ltnis zum
RationaLen (I917; 4th ed., Breslau: Tre\\'endt und Granier, 1920); translated by J. W. Harvey
as The Idea if the HoLy: An Inquir)' into the Non-RationaL Factor in the Idea if the Divine and Its
ReLation to the RationaL (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1923).
). Goethe's house in Weimar was located on the Frauenplan.
j. Wilamowitz's phrase. See U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der GLaube der HeLLenen (Berlin:
\Veidmann, 1931-1932).
k. The author (unlike Sir Karl Popper but in common with most writers in German) uses
IIistorismus "historicism" to refer to the endeavor, in historical scholarship and the humanities
generally, to interpret each historical phenomenon as having a unique character that is to be
understood as the product of a specific process of historical development. In contrast to this,
the Enlightenment, by understanding history as a whole in terms of itself as the 'goal,' or as,
at any rate, enlightened rather than 'dark,' prevented itself from understanding the unique
character of previous epochs in terms of what they had overcome (their terminus a quo, in each
case).
I. Wilhelm Wundt, ELemente der VCiLkerps)1choLogie, Grundlinien einer ps),cho!ogischen Entwicklungsgeschichte

der Menschheit (Leipzig: Kroner, 1904); translated by E. L. Schaub as ELemmts rif Folk PS)1choLogy:
Outlines if a PS)1chohistor)1 q/ the DeveLopment if Mankind (New York: Macmillan, 1916).
m. "Das Andere [neuter! ist noch nicht vorzugsweise der [masculine, i.e., personal] Andere."
n. The "ungeheuere SpnlCh"-"Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse" (roughly: "Only a god can
prevail against a god")-appears in Goethe's flus meinen Leben: Dichtzmg wid lVahrheit, Part
Four, chapter 20, ed. S. Scheibe (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1970), p. 642 kited henceforth as
DichtlUig und Warheit, ed. Scheibe). Goethe calls it ungehl'uer in the same place. For an extensive
discussion of this saying, see part 4, chapter 4, below.
o. The reference in this paragraph is to iHetaph)'Sics 982b 12-19.
p. This formula was given currency in Germany by Wilhelm Nestle's l'om j\f)1thos Z.Ulll Logos.
Die SeLbstentfaLtwlg des gri()chischen Denkens von Homer bis (Jul die Sophistik zwd Sokrates (Stllttgart:
Kroner, 1940). On this see the next chapter, text to translator's note c.
q. The idea of a system of 'positions' t hat arc 'reoccupied' in the course of changes of epoch
is central to t he author's The LegilimaC)' c:/the Modem Age kited in the Translator's Introduction,
note a). See especially part 1, chapta 6. of that hook.
r."Dcr wcrdende Gott," a formula from l'vtax Scheler. See the fi1urth to last paragraph of
part 2, chaptn 2. below, for part of its context.
2
The Name Breaks into the
Chaos of the Unnamed
Hundreds of river names are woven into the text. I think it moves.
-Joyce to Harriet Shaw Weaver, October 28, 1927
Myths are stories that are distinguished by a high degree of constancy

in their narrative core and by an equally pronounced capacity for
marginal variation. These two characteristics make myths transmissible
by tradition: Their constancy produces the attraction of recognizing
them in artistic or ritual representation as well [as in recital], and their
variability produces the attraction of trying out new and personal
means of presenting them. It is the relationship of 'theme and vari-
ations,' whose attractiveness for both composers and listeners is familiar
from music. So myths are not like 'holy texts,' which cannot be altered
by one iota.
Stories are told in order to 'kill' [vertreiben] something. In the most
harmless, but not least important case: to kill time. In another and
more serious case: to kill fear. The latter contains both ignorance and,
more fundamentally, unfamiliarity. In connection with ignorance what
is important is not that supposedly better knowledge-such as later
generations, in retrospect, have considered themselves to possess-
was not yet available. Even very good knowledge about what is in-
visible -like radiation or atoms or viruses or genes - does not put an
end to fear. What is archaic is the fear not so much of what one does
not yet know as merely of what one is not acquainted with. As some-
thing one is not acquainted with, it is nameless; as something nameless
35
Chapter 2
it cannot be conjured up or appealed to or magically attacked. Terror

[Entsetzen], for which there are few equivalents in other languages,
becomes "nameless" as the highest level of fright. So the earliest and
not the least reliable form of familiarity with the world is to find
names for what is undefined. Only then and on the strength of that
can a story be told about it.
The story says that some monsters have already disappeared from
the world, monsters that were even worse than those that lie behind
what is present; and it says that things have always been the way, or
almost the way, that they are now. That makes ages that are char-
acterized by high rates of change of their system -conditions eager for
new myths, for remythicizations, but also ill adapted for giving them-
selves what they desire. For nothing permits them to believe what
they would very much like to believe-that the world has always been
or has once before been the way it now promises or threatens to
become.
All trust in the world begins with names, in connection with which
stories can be told. This state of affairs is involved in the biblical story
of the beginning, with the giving of names in Paradise. But it is also
involved in the faith that underlies all magic and that is still characteristic
of the beginnings of science, the faith that the suitable naming of
things will suspend the enmity between them and man, turning it into
a relationship of pure serviceability. The fright that has found the way
back to language has already been endured.
Herodotus considers it important to know where the names of the
gods who appear in the myths come from. He gives it out as the result
of his own research that they come predominantly from the barbarians,
almost all of them from Egypt, and those that do not come from
Egypt come from the Pelasgians. I Of these Pelasgians, whom he stylizes
as very archaic, he says that they had "in their sacrifices ... called
upon gods ... without giving name or appellation to any; for they
had not as yet heard of such." The Pelasgians received permission,
he says, to take over the names of the as yet unnamed gods \vhom
they worshiped from Egypt, by inquiring at the oldest of all the oracles,
that of Dodona. Later this sanction \vas extended to all the Greeks.
Stories corresponding to these names were first added, he says, by
Hesiod and Homer: "But whence each of the gods came into being,
or whether they had all forever existed, and what out\vard forms they
had, the Greeks knew not till (so to say) a very little while ago." The
36
Part I
two poets had set up the family tree of the gods, had given them
their epithets, distributed their competences and honors among them,
and characterized their appearances. It is not unimportant that it was
poets and not priests who could carry out something like this with
the gods, with such lasting effect, and that the oracles too did not
prescribe any dogmatic definitions-perhaps could no longer prescribe,
once their tone of voice had been established.
It is a later rationalization when names are interpreted as attributes
of the divinity, as its characteristics and capacities, which have to be
known. What is of primary importance is not to know the god's
characteristics but to be able to call him by the name that he himself
has recognized as his own. If one can believe Herodotus, the gods
themselves weren't at all concerned to make their names known to
men, since they received their worship in any case. The knowledge
of the names of the gods reached Greece accidentally from Egypt,
and when the oracle was asked about their admissibility it consented
to their use. It is not an act of knowledge, but neither is it an event
having the quality of revelation.
The biblical tradition cultivated the idea that God wanted to be
known to his people and to be reliably accessible to them, although
it was also important to him to make his name known only for this
one purpose, and consequently only to priests. So there were evasive
and auxiliary designations, paraphrases, that allowed one to protect
the secret of the one real name. The secret name will have been a
single name at first, and only when this one was no longer reliably
hidden was the place of its knowledge taken by the other command-
ment, thought of as unfulfillable by foreigners and as easier to protect,
that one must have reliable knowledge of all of God's names if one
wants to incline him favorably and to exercise unfailing influence over
him. Here it doesn't matter how the accumulation of these names
came about, whether through amalgamation of figures, through con-
quest of foreign national divinities in the manner of the Pantheon,
through superimposition of cult traditions - \\That is decisive is that the
disposition toward secret knowledge combines most readily, in a lasting
fashion, with the principle according to which wishes vis-a-vis the
divinity are fulfilled only for one who knows all the names.
To the extent that one speaks of revelation-and thus of a dogmatic
claim of cult forms and cult stories to strictly disciplined observance-
in the limiting case such a revelation can consist solely in the com-
37
Chapter 2
munication of God's name. In the classical wntings of the Jewish

Cabala, the statement is continually repeated that "the entire Tora is
nothing but the great Name of God."2 But these names are not only
appellations, but also designations of the various ways in which God
operates and is active. When he speaks, he acts, as the account of the
Creation shows, and since he is not a demiurge his action consists
exclusively in naming the effects that he wants to achieve. For the
Cabala, again, that means that "the language of God has, in fact, no
grammar. It is composed entirely of names."
The demiurge of the Platonic myth must also speak one single time,
at the critical juncture of his work-he must, very significantly, apply
rhetoric in order, by persuasion, to bring the Ananke [necessity] that
opposes the execution of the Ideas in the cosmos into cosmic obedience.
Beyond that, the language of names here already - and momentously-
has that of numbers and geometrical figures superimposed on it. The
biblical Creation, on the other hand, is a command to come into
existence and a naming as existing: "With the creative omnipotence
of language it begins, and in the end language as it were assimilates
the created, names it. Language is therefore both creative and the
finished creation, it is word and name. In God name is creative because
it is \vord, and God's word is cognizant, because it is name. 'And he
savv that it was good'; that is: He had cognized it through name ....
That means: God made things knowable in their names. Man, however,
names them according to knowledge."3 Thus one of the presuppositions
of the biblical story of Paradise is that the Creation is accessible and
familiar to man by virtue of the fact that he knows how to call the
creatures by their names.
The reestablishment of Paradise would be once again to have the
correct name for everything, including the enigmatical creature that
one is oneself and that possesses its so-called "civil" name ["biirgerlicher
Name" family name] by the pure contingency of descent and legal
order. To find one's real nalne, or at least a ne\", one, has again and
again been connected with ideas of salvation. Maria Gundert, the
Inother of Hermann Hesse and daughter of a student of David Friedrich
Strauss who had returned to the Pietisln of his forefathers and becoIlle
a missionary and expert on Indian languages and literature, \vrote in
her diary in 1877 that her father had spoken exquisitely about the
nc\v neune that God would give to each individual, "a divine Inas-
tcrpiecc, both grammatically and lexically, a llallle that includes every-
38
Part I
thing that we were on earth, that we exp~rienced and that we became

through God's grace, a name so all-comprehensive, and comprehensive
with such an impact, that at merely hearing it called, everything past
and forgotten, the entire riddle of our life, everything in our own
nature and existence that has been hidden and incomprehensible to
us will suddenly be illuminated by the light of eternity-will appear
clearly to the soul."4 At the end of days, that is-for the subject here
is this eschatological hope - everything that had once begun with the
name and had been spun out of it will have returned into it: History
[is seen] as the carrying out of the name.
Francis Bacon, to whom the programmatic formulation of scientific
empiricism can be ascribed only with reservations, connected the re-
establishment of Paradise (relying on magical traditions more than
anything else) with the rediscovery of the original names of all things.
It is true that this part of his equation of knowing and being able was
quickly forgotten; but the accomplishments of the giving of names-
above all in the area of biological classification, with the great concluding
work of Linnaeus - are easy to overlook alongside the glamour of the
mathematical natural sciences. The modem age has become the epoch
that finally found a name for everything.
What science repeats has already been suggested by myth: the
success, achieved once and for all, of acquaintance with everything
on all sides. Myth itself tells the story of the origin of the first names
from night, from the earth, from chaos. This beginning- as Hesiod
pictures it in the Theogony-is crossed over with the ease of a leap
and a bound, with a plethora of figures. The remnants of the previous
dread now speak only to him who knows their stories as assurances
of the depletion of their power.
Aphrodite arises from the foam of the terrible castration of Uranus-
that is like a metaphor for the accomplishment of myth. But that is
not the end of its work: In Botticelli's Venus Anadyomene [Venus
rising from the sea] she rises as though from the foam of the sea-
only for one who is versed in the myth is it from the foam of the
secretion of Uranus's terrible wound. When finally at the beginning
of the twentieth century the vitalist philosopher reaches for the mythical
scene of the anadysis [rising from the sea] in order to make the original
relationship of life and form, of vital flux and eros, come clear in it,
then for him the timeless beauty of Aphrodite now arises only "from
the subsiding, scattering foam of the agitated sea."5 The background
39
Chapter 2
of terror has been made forgotten, the aestheticizing process is

complete.
The function of names is not exhausted in their allowing stories to
get under way. Otherwise the abundance of names that are laid up
around and between the figures that are equipped with stories would
be incomprehensible. Hesiod's Theogony offers the evidence for this
superabundance, and it would no doubt be aesthetic projection if one
chose to see in this only the 'poetic' aspect of the way the verses
sound. Myth is always anxious about what one might call integration;
it abhors a vacuum (as was still to be said for a long time, in a half-
mythical proposition, of nature). Its stories are seldom localized in
space, and never in time; only the structure of genealogy embeds
them in a network of definiteness. Just as little as the historian, later,
can set episode alongside episode and anecdote alongside anecdote,
since after all he is less bound to significance in the individual item
than he is to overall coherence, so little can myth set emblem alongside
emblem without joining them together by means of the matter-
names - that belongs quite exclusively to it.
Even one who reads the two genealogies of Jesus in the New Tes-
tament still has before him not only the genetic connection with David
and Abraham, indeed in Luke even with Adam and God, as the
cardinal points of a descent that establishes Jesus' credentials for the
purposes of the salvation story-he also has before him the filling up
of the empty time with names that are for the most part unknown,
not attested to in any story. Matthew expressly breaks the time down
into three phases, each composed of fourteen generations, between
Abraham and David, David and the Babylonian exile, and the latter
and Christ. Only a few of the names refer one to stories. It is striking
that, in particular, the names of the four women named in Matthew
do have such stories behind them. Of these at least one has a mythical
character: the introduction of Thamar, and her participation in the
line of descent of David and of the Messiah. When, disguised as a
harlot, she forces Judah- the father of her two deceased husbands,
who denies her the marriage to the third brother to which she is
legally entitled- to give her the progeny that makes him the ancestor
of David and of the Messiah, she pursues the ends of history against
the failure of virtue and of nature. For one who is versed in the
Scriptures and still expects the Messiah to come (or holds him already
to have come) from the stock of David, the outcome rnakes the mon-
40
Part I
strous crime comprehensible as the artful. concealment of the direction

of history.
Matthew knew what he was doing, for he inserted three additional
names of women of questionable reputation into Jesus' family tree:
Rahab, the harlot-famous elsewhere in the New Testament as well-
of Jericho; Ruth, who as a Moabite could also become an ancestress
of David; and finally Bathsheba, the wife whom David took from
Uriah. For the pre-Davidic genealogy, the fact that God made use of
detours and artifices in preparing the way for the Messiah was a matter
of indifference compared to the belief in a Messiah who had already
appeared, or to continued expectation of him. Regarding the figure
ofThamar, the Midrash Tanchuma writes: "A lover who was rewarded
was Judah, for from him sprang Pharez and Hezron, who were to
give us David and the King Messiah, who will redeem Israel. See what
devious ways God must follow before he can cause the King Messiah
to arise from Judah."6 The evangelist more than ever gives the believing
hearer of the list of names the confirmation that no particle of the
time that has passed since the beginning of the world, or since the
patriarch, has been unrelated to the event that has become pregnant
with salvation for him.
Catalogs of names carry the mark of uninventability, for we believe
that we would notice immediately if a poor invention had been included.
Even in Hesiod, well-invented names are uncommon. His catalog of
Nereids is now quite rightly credited to the poet of the Iliad. Such
display, in the great epics, creates confidence that the world and the
powers in it are well known to the poet. One can imagine that in the
rhapsodic delivery of the poem they had the effect of cult litanies,
which also have to produce reassurance that nothing is omitted and
that satisfaction can be given to everyone. The fact that this fundamental
accomplishment is no longer perceived as such is the reason why such
catalogs have an unpoetic character for modem tastes. The fact that
the world could be mastered is expressed early on by the effort to
avoid leaving any gap in the totality of names, which could only mean:
to give it out as having been avoided, by means of an excess.
Looked at from the opposite perspective, this already 'literary' phe-
nomenon still allows an initial state to show through, in which the
namelessness of what was shapeless and the striving for words for
what was unfamiliar were dominant. Thus Nereus, in Greek mythology,
is originally nameless, the old one from the sea-even in the Odyssey,
41
Chapter 2
where he appears as Proteus, the 'First One,' he is in fact still not

named, but only placed at the head of a long genealogy as the most
prolific of the children of Pont us. But since, unlike his lovely daughters,
he is without a cult, he is left in a state where one can forget about
him.7 If one perceives, in the background of the entire genealogy of
the gods, the chaos, the gaping abyss, which is only employed as a
place of derivation, of which the mode of operation is unknown and
which accordingly receives no cult, then one sees figures and names
form correlatively and gain clarity as they move away from it. It seems
almost with a sigh of relief that the classifying singer of the myth
greets the fact that nothing comes out of that abyss except what he
knows how to call by name and to fit into his system. One begins to
understand such formulas (which so easily become meaningless) as
those in the early Christian Didache, in which the believers give thanks
to their God for nothing more than his holy name. In the thanks we
can still hear the echo of the fear that he could have remained unknown,
that he could have come upon them as one who was not called.
When Mohammed encountered difficulties, with the inhabitants of
Mecca, in driving out their polytheism and demonstrating the supe-
riority of his God, they defended themselves with the argument that
their gods had names that expressed something, whereas the name
of the new god, "al-ilah," meant nothing but "the god," and was
consequently no name at all. 8 The weight that such an objection had
can also be observed in connection with Paul's speech on the Areopagus.
He makes use of the argument that while the altar to an unknown
god was a good idea, it became intolerable as soon as the name of
this god had become known and could be communicated (by him).
Except that the apostle had nothing to offer but a God who had to
deny the existence of the other gods. He would fill the gap dedicated
to the "unknown god" only by destroying the system around it that
defined the gap. The name of the unknown god, once it was com-
municated, had to develop into the negation of the function of names.
Dogma is composed of definitions.
The old suspicion that many figures of gods are younger than the
abstract qualities from which they derive their names has been aban-
doned; but the opposite state of affairs has not yet been established,
that in myth the neuter is at any rate not at home. The latter [the
neuter] is more nearly a device by which to suggest a remythicizing
process through reduction. Thus "the evil one" [der Bose, Inasculine
42
Part I
gended can return as "evil" [das Bose, ne~ted. The diabolo5 [slanderer;
devil], with which the Septuagint translates the Hebrew name "Satan"
and by which-as in the Book of Job-the figure of an accuser before
God may originally have been meant, acquires, through ambiguity,
all the characteristics of the adversary as the opposite agency.
The mysterious personalization of a neuter term, the katechon [re-
strained, in the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, will have been a
result of the unsolved problem of the Parousia [the Second Comingl.
The anonymity of a mere function designation protects against deviation
into polytheism: There is a power that still holds down and delays
the eschatological eruption, but it is not known by name and con-
sequently cannot be influenced. If delay, in the ambivalent situation
between eschatological hope and fear, cannot be unambiguously eval-
uated, then this participle with an article was rightly kept anonymous,
so that it could attract neither trust nor appeal. In a novel situation
of indefiniteness, it was like a piece of that mightiness of the primeval
time with which, for lack of a name and a face, one could not negotiate.
To equip the world with names means to divide up and classify the
undivided, to make the intangible tangible [greijbarl, though not yet
comprehensible [begreijbarl. The setting up of means of orientation also
co~teracts elementary forms of confusion-of perplexity, at the least,
and, ,in the limiting case, of panic. A precondition of this is the de-
limitation of directions and figures out of the continuum of the pregiven.
The catalog of the winds, favorable and unfavorable-as distinguished,
in a way that is not only quantitative, from that of disastrous storms-
is a distinguishing mark of a life-world in which weather can become
destiny. Campanella's City of the Sun has thirty-six points of the compass
at its disposal, instead of the otherwise customary thirty-two. The
classification of the seasons, of the elements, of the senses, of the vices
and the virtues, the temperaments and the affects, the constellations
and the ages of man - all of these are accomplishments that, for the
most part, we can still know as capable of historical documentation.
Occasionally, posited systems of order have to be retracted, as with
the distinction between the morning star and the evening star, the
identity of which was not yet known to Hesiod.
Myth is a way of expressing the fact that the world and the powers
that hold sway in it are not abandoned to pure arbitrariness. However
this may be signified, whether by a separation of powers or through
a codification of competences or through a 'legalization' of relationships,
43
Chapter 2
it is a system of the elimination of arbitrariness. Even in the latest,

ironically scientific use of mythical names, this element comes through.
The planets of the solar system have long borne mythical names, and
when the first new one was discovered-Herschel's Uranus-it was
pre decided not only what this one would be called but also what was
the only way in which names of further ones could be arrived at.
The ritual of christening did not function entirely without friction.
The French astonomer Arago wanted Uranus to be named "Herschel,"
after its discoverer, probably not without the thought that this would
create space in the heavens for further discoverers. Thus, in 1846,
after the telescopic confirmation of his mathematical discovery of
Neptune, Leverrier did not fail to press Arago to accept the name
"Leverrier" for the new planet. He announced this as a resolution in
the French Academy of Sciences on October 5, 1846. Perhaps Leverrier
would not have been seduced into hubris if the Berlin astronomer
Galle, who had made the optical discovery, had not proposed the
name 'Janus," because Janus was genealogically prior to Saturn.
Leverrier rejected this name on the mistaken assumption that Janus
was the Roman god not only of gateways and doors but also of
boundaries and that this christening would suggest that the planet just
discovered was the last one in the solar system. Leverrier himself, not
yet thinking of what were to be his own ambitions of a few days later,
proposed the name "Neptune." This was accepted so rapidly among
astronomers outside France that Arago's authority remained without
effect. Leverrier had already exercised the right of the discoverer, but
only by submitting for a moment to the expected elimination of free
choice. 9 Nationalisms, such as came into play later in the new discoveries
in the periodic table of the elements, were not yet involved. They had
no chance against the 'objectivity' of the mythological nomenclature
in the case of the discovery - announced by Lowell on the basis of
disturbances in the orbit of Neptune and confirmed by Tombaugh-
of the planet Pluto, in 1930.
On June 22, 1978, the American astronomer James Christy, in
Arizona, discovered with high probability a satellite of Pluto, since on
several photographs the same blemishes appeared against the disk of
the planet's light. It would be the thirty-fifth Inoon of a planet in the
solar system. The naming was accomplished lTIOre quickly and with
less trouble than the final verification of the discovery: the satellite of
Pluto would be called Charon. To the god of the underworld \vas
44
Part I
added the ferryman who carries the dead across the Acheron into
Hades. The christening was not without a convergence with reality,
since on Pluto the sun is no longer a source of light and would scarcely
still be visible to an unaided eye. Accordingly Pluto's moon, too, cannot
be a figure of light comparable to our moon; it is a dusky companion,
recognizable by possible Plutonians only when it covers up stars.
The names that were the earliest still stand ready as the last, when
the stories already have been almost forgotten again. They are like a
reservoir of the elimination of free choice, and that not only in the
landscape of nineteenth-century European education, where classicism
still reverberates, but even in the mass production of the almost au-
tomated evaluation of exposed film in the astronomy of the latter
part of the twentieth century. Is that a late success of myth, of its
indelible traces in our history, or is it the almost ironical exploitation
of myth for effect? Is there a qualitative difference between Herschel's
"Uranus," which after all was the first and scarcely anticipated surprise
in what was thought of as a completed system, and "Charon," which
is suspected only on the basis of blemishes in the pictorial data and
cannot even be demonstrated, like Neptune, as a source of orbital
perturbation?
Herschel's planetary discovery had been one of the decisive breaches
of the suggestion of cOlupleteness that had been set up by the postulate
of visibility: Up to that point only 'satellites' had been confirmed by
telescopes-no planets. The basic constitution of the solar system still
seemed to be related to man's natural optics. The name "Uranus"
already almost exhausted the mythical genealogy, unless one wanted
to have recourse to "Chaos." Still, the sea god of indefinite age,
Poseidon/Neptune, was an elegant solution that no longer designated
any breach of empirical rationality but merely the quantitative
optimization of means for an indefinite 'and so forth.' There was no
shock of repugnance to order when it turned out that Pluto's highly
eccentric orbit made it possible for it to exchange positions with Nep-
tune: Early in 1979 Pluto cut across Neptune's orbit and will be closer
than it to the sun until 1999. No one any longer feels-though the
Associated Press even issues it as a syndicated report-that this ex-
change of places introduces anything like 'enlightenment' in the minds
that are now called consciousness. The report does not need to be
disarmed [by commentary] any more than does that of the most recent
or the next comet to cross the earth's orbit. The background of a
tradition that would no longer have trusted the 'cosmos' in which such
things were possible has faded away entirely.
This makes it all the more surprising that the names survive. The
name "Pluto," which was conferred in 1930, is not a friendly bow to
the humanistic realm, but an entirely logical connection between the
unnamed in its latest mode of appearance-as a scarcely perceptible
'remnant,' forcibly snatched from unrecognition-and its earliest om-
nipresence. In such an act one can still be conscious of what Plato has
his spokesman say about 'onomathesy' [setting up names]: "It seems
that the first men who gave names to things were no ordinary per-
sons .... "10 A world that is full of names has kept one quality of the
world that was full of gods: It has kept subjects for its statements that
are perceptibly different from those that are presented when a radio
galaxy's or some other quasi-stellar object's inaccessibility to our natural
optics is acknowledged by its designation with letters and numbers.
It is the 'intentionality' of the history of the working up of myth
that alone allows us, by thinking of it as proceeding constantly over
time, also to make conjectures about what in each case are the previous
phases of this history. But theories about the origin of myths are idle.
Here the rule is: Ignorabimus [We will not know]. Is that bad? No, since
we don't know anything about the 'origins' in other cases either. Even
so, such theories have implications that reach further than the claim
to explain the phenomenon allows us to see. In his Treatise on the Origin
of Inequality among Men, Rousseau explicitly did not want his conjectures
about the initial situation to be taken as historical truths; but he did
not escape the fate of seeing the suppositions that he had introduced
only to illuminate later situations received as normative origins.
Did myth work up the terrors of an unfamiliar world, with which
it was confronted, into stories, or did it produce the terrors, for which
it then also had palliatives to offer? If one follows the 'enlightenments'
in the tradition of Epicurus, down to the Enlightenment of the modern
age, then the exciting of fear and hope through myths is part of the
repertory of priestly castes, which provided themselves in this way
with the monopoly of redemption and of the procuring of salvation,
just as the lawyers in the comedy take care of the trials arising from
conflicts that they themselves have previously foisted on their dents.
The fruitlessness of such enlightenment can hardly be explained without
focusing on the frivolity of its hypotheses about the derivation and
the durability of what considers it to be necessary and possible to
46
Part I
overcome. So assulnptions about the origins of myth are not without

consequences for supposed triumphs over it. Neither are they with-
out consequences for the assessment of the potential for its (wished-
for or feared) return, as well as for discerning its ways of functioning
and modes of reception.
It was the pride of the modem age as it got under way that it had
made a clean sweep-or, at any rate, would soon be able to make a
clean sweep - of myths as well as of dogmas, of conceptual systems
as well as of authorities, under the comprehensive rubric of prejudices.
Backwardness in this regard appeared as an indefensible atavism, a
wish formation, a stubborn product of the application of flattery to
anthropocentric vanity. What was supposed to be rational was what
was left over when reason, as the organ adapted to uncovering illusions
and contradictions, had cleared away the sediments that had accu-
mulated from schools and poets, from magicians and priests - in other
words, from seducers of all kinds. Both were supposed to be called
reason: the organ of critical destruction, and the residue that it exposes.
The suspicion that there was no guarantee that anything at all would
be left over, or what it would be when those sedimented opacities of
the ages had been cleared away, had no chance of a hearing until it
broke through in the form of Romanticism's flagrant denial. It was
the delayed application to the efforts of the Enlightenment of the
metaphor of peeling an onion.
The counterposition was expressed in its most drastic form by Heine
in his later years. It is true, he says, that the battle of philosophy
against religion is carried on with the goal of destroying the latter and
allowing the former to prevail, as in the replacement of the ancient
gods by the Christian God and again in the finishing off of Christianity
by contemporary philosophy, but in both cases without final success
and with a prospect of repetition. A new religion will certainly come,
the philosophers will get fresh work again, and once more in vain:
"The world is a great stable, which cannot be cleaned as easily as
that of Augeas because while one sweeps it the oxen remain inside
and continually pile up more dung.... "11 This gloomy allusion to one
of the labors of Hercules tells us nothing about their futility, which
was presumably out of the question for the myth of the superhuman
son of Zeus. But it reminds one of the cynicism with which Napoleon
had confirmed the failure of the Enlightenment, when he said on Saint
Helena, regarding the way in which his age mythicized him: "They
47
Chapter 2
make a Hercules out of me!"12 Still, this Napoleon had considered

declaring himself to be the son of God, but had recognized that this
was no longer feasible because the peoples were too enlightened.
Apotheosis, without the name, was only the equivalent of the staging
of theophanies. The peoples, as it turned out, were not sufficiently
enlightened to make impossible, as a reality, something whose name
alone had been successfully put out of circulation. Though the ailing
emperor might be surprised that the role of Hercules was ascribed to
him, the rising General Bonaparte, who equipped his expedition to
Egypt in 1798 with every attribute of the mythical repetition of the
campaigns of Alexander the Great and of Rome's taking of new prov-
inces, would not have been.
When the enterprise had failed, he was also done with Enlightenment
and revolution: "I am sick of Rousseau since I have seen the Orient;
the savage is a dog."13 This, even before the coup d'etat, is the failure
of the Enlightenment in the shattering of its presuppositions, all the
way to the i.,ntolerability of what was supposed to be the foundation
of the Egyptian adventure: not only the imitation of Alexander and
of Rome, but also the opening up of access to the oldest culture as a
legitimation of the new reason, as the establishment of a connection
across the indifference of the ages. That is certainly thoroughly
mythically conceived. The contingent event is legitimized by establishing
ownership of the whole of history, and is shattered by the public
exhibition of this claim. The myth was cut short by reality. The con-
queror could not tolerate the fact that this Orient did not look the
way it would have had to look in order to be worthy of his theophany.
Heine's comparison of the world to the Augean stables could not
explain, any more than Napoleon's cynicism could, why philosophy
had not been able to accomplish what it had claimed to accomplish.
Someone who declares a question to be a philosophical one has an
initial duty, as a minimum accomplishment that could be accepted in
place of an answer, to characterize the type of answer that is required
or possible. The answer to the question why philosophy as enlight-
enment was not able to accomplish what it had claimed to accomplish
could be of the following kind: The philosophical 'destruction';! was
aimed at and adapted to contents that were easy to hit; and for that
very reason it failed to appreciate the intellectual and emotional needs
that these contents had to satisfy. Further, it imagined the process of
such a destruction as a critical coup de main with which, overnight,
48
Part I
the walls of La Fleche were to be tom down.b Finally, it saw seriousness

only on its own side, in its determination to pursue denudation, and
not on the side of the secure situations [Geborgenheiten], which it regarded
as superficial.
Otherwise the fascination would not have been allowed to escape
it, either, to which it itself always succumbed when it sought to ap-
propriate or to win back the great images of myth as forms in which
its truth was concealed. The temptation to pursue allegorical inter-
pretations was characteristic of philosophy right into the last century,
if not even into our own. But it was never regarded as being instructive
beyond the level of rhetoric and style. Romanticism generally seemed
contemptible to philosophers, although they could have learned from
it what underlay the stubbornness of the resistance to the Enlightenment
and the final success of opposition to it in the name of the primeval
truths. Romanticism is certainly an antiphilosophical movement, but
that is not sufficient to make it unimportant and barren for philosophy.
There is nothing that philosophers should have analyzed more eagerly
than the opposition to their cause. In this connection they must be
clear that the antithesis between myth and reason is a late and a poor
invention, because it forgoes seeing the function of myth, in the
overcoming of that archaic unfamiliarity of the world, as itself a rational
function, however due for expiration its means may seem after the
event.
One of the arguments of Romanticism was that the truth could not
and should not be as young as the Enlightenment had undertaken to
present it as being. The reasons may often be obscure, but there is
also a clear one, namely, that otherwise man's rational nature would
be badly constituted, and consequently he could not be confident of
his present or his future either. To the unseriousness of myth, Ro-
manticism attaches the seriousness of the conjecture that in it there
is hidden the unrecognized, smuggled contents of an earliest revelation
to mankind, perhaps of the recollection of Paradise, which was so
nicely interchangeable with Platonic anamnesis. Thus it reevaluated
the Enlightenment's idea that myths were stories from the childhood
of the human race; that is, that while they were anticipations of the
future, more reliable business of theory, they were calculated to appeal
to the susceptibility of a reason that, while it was as yet unilluminated,
nevertheless did not wish to leave everything alone. In nan1es, the
original language of myth had left behind something of its paradisaic
49
Chapter 2
immediacy: "Each of their names seemed to be the key to the soul

of each thing in nature," Novalis indicated, referring to a distant and
different understanding by means of a "sacred language. "14 Against
the expectation of all truth from a science that always remains in the
future, Romanticism and historicism set up the more or less distinct
idea of a substance of tradition that changes only in form and that
seemed to allow even recovery of the original idea, if one only had
a key. Even if no original idea was rediscovered, still, a by-product
of this turning was the higher valuation of names as very reliable
invariants. Even where conquerors repeatedly moved in over the
established residents and forced their language upon them, the names
of waters and of summits, of prominent features of the landscape and
of fields, remained the old ones. The earliest orientations of dwelling
got their evidence, as something that couldn't be invented, from this
stationariness beneath all migrations.
What was meant by the antithesis of reason and myth was in fact
that of science and myth. When the latter antithesis is claimed as
already applying to the ancient world, with the phrase that was put
into currency by the title of Nestle's book, Yom Mythos zum Logos [From
myth to logos],' then that is a secondary effect of the characteristic
endeavor of Neo-Kantianism to make plato the founder of the theo-
retical tradition that is supposed to have found its logical completion
in Kant. The concept of 'hypothesis' becomes the main item of evidence
for this. Paul Natorp's work, Platos Ideenlehre [Plato's doctrine of ideas],d
dated (in its foreword) "Marburg, 1902," not only founded and justified
the amazing interest of the subsequent half century in Plato and in
ancient philosophy in general, but also had the specific consequence
that Plato's services on behalf of such an early projection of scientific
thought could be asserted and praised only at the cost of playing do\vn
the role of his philosophical myths and banishing them to the mar-
ginality of stylistic ornamentation.
The importance of this effect of Neo-Kantianism cannot be over-
estimated. If Plato had already traversed half of the distance to Kant,
there no longer needed to be the "chasm of a historical emptiness
and wasteland" between Plato and Kant, across which a bridge would
first of all have to be built. 15 Here, for the first time, the Enlightenment's
image of history is fundamentally and definitively altered: The modem
age does not begin with an absolute act of foundation at the edge of
the abyss of dark epochs preceding it; instead, the Renaissance, as a
50
Part I
renewal of Platonism and thus of the ':Idea as hypothesis," already

has the rank of science. Figures like Nicholas of Cusa, Galileo, Kepler,
Descartes, and Leibniz move onto the single plane of the continuation
of the Platonic inheritance. e There is no leap from Plato to Kant, nor
is there between Idea and a priori, since both refer to the same
"fundamental idea of scientific world history," which is present here
for the first time.
Now it will be easy to see that the neglect of the art myths in Plato
could not have been maintained for long. But the necessary correction
was only an individual move in a more comprehensive correction that
intended to take that concept of a scientific world history completely
seriously and was no more prepared to accept a hiatus between myth
and logos than between the ancient world and the modem age. Still
within Neo-Kantianism, a philosophy of myth comes into being-and
not of myth only, but of those phenomena of expression that in their
tum are not theoretical, not yet scientific. This philosophy makes one
conceive of the mythical as the aggregate of those accomplishments
that, as surrogates, are necessary and possible in order to endure and
to live in a world that has not yet found its way to any theory. If
Hermann Cohen had still said that "idea" was "unquestionably the
most important concept of the language of philosophy," for Cassirer
the most important concept is one that is remote from the actual
terminologies of philosophy and consequently is able to transcend
their history - the concept of symbol. The theory of the symbolic forms
allows one for the first time to correlate the expressive means of myth
with those of science, but in a historically irreversible relationship and
with the unrelinquishable presupposition of science as the terminus ad
quem [goal toward which the process is directed].
Myth is made obsolete by what comes after it; science cannot be
made obsolete, however much, in each of its steps forward, it itself
makes the preceding steps obsolete. More subtly historicized than in
the Enlightenment's crude expectations of the reason that was to be
emancipated by it but for the actual accomplishments of which it had,
at the same time, a low regard, myth moves into a position that has
a functional value of its own only in relation to a totality that counts,
as though as a matter of course, as something that can already be
surveyed. It is a delay in a history of which it is always well established
how it will continue. Such prior knowledge from the point of view of
the supposed goal prevents one from focusing on myth as a mode of
51
Chapter 2
working up reality, which has its own legitimacy. Instead it is the

placeholder of a reason that cannot rest content with this accomplish-
ment and that ultimately subjects it to measurement against categories
with \vhich science comprehends itself in the stage of its completion.
With science, it appears, we have 'come through' [ausgestanden] the
affinity to myth. Nowhere does it appear, as a temptation or a way
out, that one could relapse into the system of forms and the capacity
for totality that characterized the mythical phase of history. At the
same time it remains curious that precisely the recognition of myth's
specific 'rationality' should render it definitively archaic and 'bygone.'
Against the background of his Neo-Kantianism, it is not without
irony that Cassirer, the theorist of myth, completed as the last in the
long sequence of his works The Myth of the State, which appeared only
in 1946, a year after his death. Naturally this was a domain for which
the philosophy of symbolic forms had least of all made provision, a
domain in which it was at a loss. What Cassirer registers is funda-
mentally a unique Romantic regression, which it does not seem possible
to fit into any philosophy of history.
The historian of philosophy, of science, of the cultural subject, of
the consciousness of reality, cannot too generously overlook such Ro-
mantic thrusts - which breach the image of a reason that irresistibly
secures its rights - so as to avoid being disturbed in his philosophy of
history. Rationality and irrationality are not predicates of the universe,
Nietzsche claimed, and he by no means wanted this knowledge to be
entitled Romanticism. What is called Romanticism is not, after all,
merely that. Philosophy easily integrated this into its history, like so
much that had gone before, and imputed itself even to those who, in
these and other forcible dicta, proclaimed themselves to be excluded
from it and believed that by this means they could decree its end at
the same time. As such, certainly everyone who lives by the possibility
of confusing the end of an unloved reality with the beginning of an
anticipated one is such a Romantic without the title, even if Novalis's
"blue flower" has changed its color, a century later, to the "black
flower" in George's Algabal. f
Affinity to myth always consists in finding and naming the subject
of which the last of the correct stories can be told. Even what is
traditionally most abstract can become a name, as soon as it is trans-
formed into an acting or a suffering subject. It can be as insubstantial
in appearance as "Being." When it has become the name of a subject
52
Part I
that is pregnant with stories, this can be. gathered from people's con-
sidering the possibility of, or actually, no longer writing it like the old
abstract noun. What makes "the story of Being"g into another piece
of Romanticism is the circumstance, which is presupposed in it, that
the true future can be nothing but the true past. Not as the 'turning
back' of man who has been promoted to the status of the subject of
history, but as the 'return' of the Being that was hidden, throughout
an epoch, by metaphysics. Its return-not foreseen, but only to be
awaited-is no better than the new creation that must result from
the impending chaos, at whatever price.
Common to all affinities to myth is the fact that they do not make
one believe or even allow one to believe that anything could have
been definitively 'come through' in the history of mankind, however
often people believed they had put it behind them. That is not a
matter of course, since myth itself speaks of monsters that have been
subdued, of power that has been refined. Historical experience seems
to speak against any finality of restraints that have been or can be
arrived at. W e have learned to regard 'overcomings' of this and that
with mistrust, especially since the conjecture, or the suspicion, of la-
tencies has arisen. We are acquainted with regressions to early states,
with primitivisms, barbarisms, brutalisms, atavisms. Should declines
and extinctions h be excluded here? They contain the consolation of
what they could make possible again. Withering away can offer less
consolation than being struck dead by the stars in their fall.
If there are not to be alternative mythogonies [accounts of the
genesis of myth] between which a decision is possible, still doubtless
there will be a typology of them, just as there is in the case of cos-
mogonies. In connection with the latter, if I see the situation correctly,
we have a choice between one initial situation where matter is dis-
tributed uniformly and extremely thinly in space, and another where
the primal matter is concentrated to the highest possible degree in a
single almost pointlike center of mass. Kant and Laplace took the first
hypothesis as their point of departure, and the more recent
cosmogonies, since the discovery of the galactic Doppler effect and
the Hubble constant, take the explosion of the concentrated mass as
theirs.
For the problem of mythogony there are fundamental theses that
correspond reasonably accurately to this rough sketch of a typology
of theorems. They can best be described, by analogy to the classical
53
Chapter 2
alternative theories of biological development, as preformation and

epigenesis. The theory, modeled on Gestalt psychology, of the excess
pressure of data - in other words, the postulation of the cultural' diges-
tion' [Verarbeitung] of an original 'inundation of stimuli'-is contradicted
by the asserted or actually extensive correspondence of contents and
basic forms of myth [in different cultures]. Such correspondences have
provoked both genetic and metaphysical deductions.
The culture-circle theory was based on the assumption of a tradition
extending, with a high degree of constancy, through man's entire
history, and traced the cultural correspondences back to an initial
condition of mankind in an original circumscribed region. 16 Mankind's
capacity for transporting constants through time and space, in this
theory, looks amazing. If one doesn't concede it, one can't avoid more
or less explicit assumptions to the effect that man is fundamentally
equipped, independently of cultural tradition, with categorical or sym-
bolic modes of 'digestion.' One is then threatened by the fate of all
Platonisms: The derivation of accomplishments from innate or re-
membered forms can 'explain' everything only by the fact that it has
been there all along. If one had to acquiesce in that, one would at
any rate have acquiesced in the weakest form of theory.
The giving of names largely escapes the great theoretical alternatives.
In understanding it, one is caught between the original quality of the
"momentary gods" postulated by Hermann Usener and the late con-
struction that generalizes the formation of names through allegory. It
is the dilemma that Socrates arbitrates in the dialogue with Philebus
that carries that latter's name. Philebus had declared hedone, pleasure,
which governs everything and evades every discussion of its justification,
as his goddess, and had given her the name of her concept. Socrates
insists that this goddess too must retain her old and official cult name
of Aphrodite.
It is not only ironical that the Socrates who was shortly to be indicted
and condemned on charges of rejecting the state gods takes his stand
against the apotheosis of a philosophical abstraction - Plato must also
have meant ironically the fact that the one who appealed to his dai-
monion [tutelary spiritJ as a final authority, beyond the need for jus-
t.ification, denied his opponent the same privilege of introducing a
'ne\\7 god,' an authorit.y having no need for justification. Socrates reject.s
specifically the omnipotent divinity of pleasure that is capable of being
singled out by philosophy - in favor of an Aphrodite ""ho is bound
54
Part I
up, by myth, in the division of powers .on Olympus, and is provided

for in the state cult only among others.
In the Philebus dialogue, the correlate of the mythical pattern of
that Olympian interconnectedness is the existential metaphor of the
mixed drink of life. The insistence on the old name is only the fore-
ground aspect of resistance to the attributes of philosophical gods,
equipped as they are with universal quantifiers, and to their monocracy.
The rejection of Philebus is more radical than that of other opponents
of Socrates: He withdraws from the dialogue.
The fact that myth has to do with origins is far from consecrating
it for the later observer; the fact that it ever got free of them, that it
is able to characterize and make comprehensible the distance between
itself and them, is the quintessence of what a 'mythology' [a study or
doctrine of myth] can still offer. This includes what is achieved by a
stabilization of names that is remote from controversy. It is over-
stating the case to go the full length of characterizing this already as
"legitimacy"; it is more nearly the trivial quality-a 'premodality'-
of the taken-for-grantedness of something that is named in the life-
world, a quality that it accumulates. At the end of his "Princess of
Babylon," with the characteristic suspension between ironical respect
and enlightened disdain in which he leaves facts about exotic cultures,
Voltaire comments in regard to the identity of names of the star and
the port city of Canopus that no one had ever known whether the
god of this name had founded the city or the inhabitants of the city
had made the god for themselves, whether the star had given its name
to the city or the city to the star: "All that is known is that the city
and the star were very old. But that is also all that can be known of
the origin of things, of whatever kind they may be." 17
Canopus, a city on the western arm of the Nile Delta, is supposed
to have been founded by the Spartans in honor of the mythical steers-
man in Menelaus's ship; since the first-magnitude star of the same
name dominates the southern constellation of the ship Argo, the analogy
is immediately evident. The astral school of mythology was no less
productive than the sexual one in attaching a correlate to every feature
of myth: to the constellations, the daily and annual motions of the
sun, the phases of the moon, the planets. Since our purpose here is
not to devise hypotheses about the origin of myths, it remains to
compare this perhaps earliest success in mastering the public aspect
55
Chapter 2
of the reality of the life-world by means of names with the latest one,
which relates to the opposite pole, the psychic underworld.
No success in hitting on names can be compared to Freud's. To go
on to present evidence of that would violate every relevant adage.
What I would like to present evidence of is an element of biographical
significance in the office of assigning names to 'subterranean' phe-
nomena. Significances simply crowded in upon Freud. No doubt he
distilled what he wrote to Wilhelm Fliess on April 14, 1898, about an
Easter trip to Istria, a trip that also immediately played a role in The
Interpretation of Dreams.
Freud reports to his friend in Berlin on his inspection of the stalactite
caves in the Carso near Divaca, an underworld filled with "giant
horsetail, pyramid cakes, tusks growing upwards, curtains, com-cobs,
tents and draperies, hams and poultry hanging from above," and on
the discoverer of Rudolfs Cave, a decayed and alcoholic genius who
immediately revealed himself to the analyst's gaze as a figure of the
conversion of libido: "When he said he had already been in 36 'holes'
in the Carso, I recognized him as a neurotic and his conqUistador exploits
as an erotic equivalent." The man's ideal was "to come to Vienna to
get ideas for naming his stalactites from the things in the museums. "18
Down below there had been, in Freud's own words, "Tartarus itself,"
an underworld not inferior to Dante's fantasies of the Inferno. It cannot
be accidental that Freud gave the friend who was initiated into his
constructions such a detailed report of the caves and of their discoverer
and name-seeker. Consider the fact that this correspondence also
shows us Freud's most influential name-invention, his recourse to
Oedipus. And his first theory of the endogenous formation of myths
as images of the psychic apparatus.
Only to someone who, like Fliess, speculated along with and ahead
of him could Freud communicate the rough idea of a "psycho
mythology": "Can you imagine what 'endopsychic myths' are? They
are the latest product of my mental labor. The dim inner percep-
tion of one's own psychical apparatus stimulates illusions, \vhich are
naturally projected outwards .... "19 It is completely inappropriate for
the editors to refer us, in connection with this earliest mythogony, to
the t.reatise "Creative Writers and Daydreaming" ["Der Dichter und
das Phantasieren"] of 1906, where myths are called the "age-long
dreams of young humanity" and are thus given a phylogenetic status;
whereas the "endopsychic myths" are not primarily contents of the
56
Part I
psychic apparatus and of the memori~s it possesses but are rather

something like its muddled self-representation, which 'explains' both
the diffusion of myth around the world and also the intensity of its
reception. One is almost tempted to impute to Freud a reading of
Kant's "Dreams of a Spirit -Seer" ["Traume eines Geistersehers" (1766)],
as the means by which he arrived at this type of theorem; but there
are no other grounds for such an imputation.
In this connection it is important to observe that Freud's earliest
description of the psychic apparatus, in the "Entwurf einer Psychologie"
(so named only by its editorsY of 1895, does not yet seem to take
notice of the function of assigning names. The possibility cannot be
excluded that it was the cave guide in the Istrian Carso, three years
later, possessed as he was by the lifework of finding names, who first
made it manifest to Freud that any reconnoitering of the unknown is
confronted with the urgency of seeing that unknown also as something
unnamed and in need of naming. For the attempt at describing the
psychic apparatus and its internal energy drama in the language of
neurophysiology and brain anatomy had already ceased to satisfy the
author of The Interpretation of Dreams. He replaces a world of excitation
quantities and stimulus conduits with a system of agencies and their
'separation of powers,' a system that seems to tend irresistibly toward
the condition of hypostatization, of personification, or at any rate of
active powers. While the structure of the neuron theory of 1895 presents
itself to the observer in terms of the horizontal metaphor of a system
of conduits, the system of the ego and the unconscious, the superego
and the id, desire and censorship, discharge and repression, instinctual
energy and symbolism, traumatic injury and neurotic symptom, is
that of a vertical imagination, which as such would already have an
affinity to myth, even if it had never reached the point of producing
a mythogony. In the "Entwurf' of 1895 there were, in contrast, only
currents, stimulus escape, zero levels, resistance to discharge, contacts
and barriers, perception and memory cells, openings of and preferences
for paths, quantity reserves and degrees of penetrability, screens and
sieves. Even the ego, which is introduced separately and almost cer-
emonially, is nothing but a certain state of organization of this system
of channels, a mere degree of complication of its conductivity for
primary processes. ~o
When Freud nevertheless proclaims the self-perception of the psychic
apparatus as his first mythogony, the mythogony of the endogenous
57
Chapter 2
myths, he anticipates the tendency toward transformation of the early

sketch all the way to the metapsychological essays of 1915. He invents
the term metapsychology as a counterconcept to metaphysics as early
as a year after the "Entwurf einer Psychologie," in the letter to Fliess
of April 2, 1896: Metapsychology is something like the reverse trans-
lation of the outward projection of those individual endogenous myths;
in other words, it is also their employment as orientation in the con-
struction of the internal dramaturgy. But there remain mysteries re-
garding the final state of the planned Metapsychology, since of the twelve
pieces of work belonging to it only five were published in 1915, and
the remaining seven were probably destroyed) The concept of "en-
dopsychic myths" would after all have finally led to the kind of ex-
planation exemplified by 'innate ideas,' although what presents itself
in the confused self-perception of the psychic apparatus is not supposed
to be a complex of ideas complete with content. While the fundamental
equipment for the production of myths would then be the psychic
functional system itself, this would involve its depriving itself of its
functional character. It is the explanation of myth as the latency of
prehistoric experiences of mankind that detaches it, for the first time,
from the mechanism of ontogenetic projection.
The last step is only taken at a very late date, when, with the concept
of "construction," Freud expresses resignation in regard to the complete
penetration of infantile amnesia. In "construction" the patient receives,
in place of the recollection that he fails to come up with, an offer of
a made-up story, an hypothesis of what he doesn't know, which under
favorable conditions he accepts as his 'truth.' Here for the first time,
in 1937, the place of the early endogenous myth has been taken by
an exogenous one-a means employed, in a state of desperation, to
satisfy the unrelinquishable need for truth. In this year of writing
"Constructions in Analysis" one of his life's final perceptions of sig-
nificance overcomes Freud, one that connects him to his earliest
mythogony: His student Marie Bonaparte writes to hilll, on December
30, 1936, that she has obtained his correspondence with Wilhehn Fliess
from a person entrusted with it by Fliess's widow in Berlin. Freud
responds to her, on January 3, 1937, that "the matter of the corre-
spondence with Fliess has stirred me deeply .... I don't \vant any of
it to become known to so-called posterity. "21 That already falls under
the category of 'significance' ['Bedeutsamkeit'l.
58
Part I
Translator's Notes
a. Destruktion. This also happens to be the term used by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time,
trans. john Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 41ff. (pp.
18t[ of German editions) for what he proposed to do to the history of ontology. As "decon-
struction," it has recently been popularized by jacques Derrida.
b. La Fleche was ajesuit college at which Descartes and other prominent seventeenth-century
rationalists studied.
c. Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos: Die Selbstentfaltung des griechischen Denkens von Homer
bis auf die Sophistik und Sokrates (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1940).
d. Paul Natorp, Platos Ideenlehre: Eine Einfohrung in den Idealismus (Leipzig: Durr, 1903).
e. For some of the author's own ideas on the relationship between Plato and early modern
thought, see his "Pseudoplatonismen in der Naturwissenschaft der friihen Neuzeit," Abhandlungen
der Akademie zu Mainz (Geistes- und sozialwiss. Kl.), 1971, no. 1.
f. T.he "blue flower" is a central symbol in Novalis's (Friedrich von Hardenberg's) Heinrich
von Ofterdingen (1800). The "black flower" of Stefan George's Algabal can be found in the Gesamt-
Ausgabe der Werke (Berlin: Bondi, 1927-1934), vol. 2, p. 96.
g. 'Seinsgeschichte' (author's scare quotes)-Heidegger's term for the vicissitudes of man's relation
to Being.
h. Untergange, as in Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West).
i. The translator gave this the title "Project for a Scientific Psychology," in S. Freud, The
Origins if Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1954), 347-445.
]- The five papers are published under the editor's collective tide, "Papers on Metapsychology,"
In Freud, Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953- ), vol. 14,
pp. 103-258.
3
'Significance'
Ah, les vieilles questions, les vieilles n~~ponses, il n'y a que c;a!
- Beckett, Fin de partie
[All life long the same questions, the same answers!]
More important than to know what we are not going to know, namely,
how myth came to exist and what experiences underlie its contents,
is to work up and to coordinate with history the ideas about the origin
and the original character of myth that we have made for ourselves
at various points in our history. For like the work expended on its
figures and contents themselves, the account of its genesis that is put
forward by mythology [i.e., by the study of myth] is also a reagent
having an effect on a way of working on myth, and on the obstinacy
of inheritance with which it accompanies us through history. If there
is anything at all that deserves the attribution of the phrase "It stays
with me," it is the archaic imagination, whatever it may have been
that provided its initial material.
Two antithetical concepts make it possible to classify ideas of the
origin and the originative character of myth: poetry and terror. At the
beginning stands either the imaginative extravagance of anthropo-
morphic appropriation of the world and theomorphic enhancement
of man, or the naked expression of the passivity of fear and hon-or,
of demonic captivity, magic helplessness, utter dependency. It is better,
however, not to go on to equate this pair of rubrics with the antithesis
between irresponsibility and an orientation to reality.
60
Part I
That the poets lie is an old saying, .and the discovery of truth in
poetry may only be an episode of the late aesthetic metaphysics that
wanted art to stop being the mere exercise of imagination. That poets
are the earliest stage of the transmission of work on myth that is
accessible to us is a phenomenon of foreshortening that is a result of
our point of view; above all, it does not mean that the poetry involved
in the work of myth must have given myth a mendacious character.
When Jean Paul says, in his School for Aesthetics, that "the Greeks believed
in the gods and heroes they sang about," this serves him in the first
place and above all as a contrast to the classicism of his time, for
which these gods of the Greeks were "only flat images and empty
dress for our feelings, not living beings." At the same time Jean Paul
has something that he can blame for the fact that the ease with which
myth had been produced had not survived; it was the introduction of
the concept of "false gods" that brought the song of the gods to an
end. 1 More than imagining their restoration through art, Jean Paul
expressed his age's longing for gods who could only promote man's
serenity through their own.
When Romanticism rediscovered fairy tales and legends, it did so
with an almost defiant gesture, in the manner of the Enlightenment
and in opposition to it: Not everything was deception that had not
been allowed past the checkpoint of reason. Bound up with this was
the new evaluation of the sphere of the origin of these materials and
figures, which had begun with Vico and Herder. The early times of
the peoples, before the episode of classical antiquity, had not only
been characterized by darkness and dread, it was asserted, but also
and above all by the purest childlike condition in which truth and lie,
reality and dream, are not distinguished from one another.
The understanding of myth, or what we can still call mythology,
has not benefited from being harnessed into these antitheses of
Enlightenment and Romanticism, of realism and fiction, of belief and
unbelief. If there is something correct in Jean Paul's observation that
the gods of the early times were not subject to the question of whether
they were the true gods until they had been demonized as the false
ones, then his formula that the Greeks believed what they sang must
also be understood in a way that avoids involvement with the concept
of 'belief,' which came into being only when the condemnation and
the sin of unbelief existed. For the question raised by the latter was
after all only marginally the question of whether a god or gods existed
61
Chapter 3
at all; centrally, it was always the question which god was the true
god or which gods were admissible and reliable.
The antithesis of poetry and terror in connection with the origin
and the beginning of myth, and in connection with its originative
quality itself, is tied to more general premises of the kind of projection
in which the philosophy of history engages. While Romanticism's op-
position to the Enlightenment, together with the postulate - since Vico
and Herder-of mankind's initial childlike poetry, was not necessarily
presented as a history of decline, beginning with a golden age and
continuing through a series of metals of declining quality, it did un-
avoidably lead to the thesis that great resourcefulness, effort, and art
would be needed in order to recover and to renew at least something
of the deteriorated and buried achievements of the early times. Until,
in the course of Romanticism's development, the original poetry became
the original revelation, which had to be recovered.
Ignoring for now the difference between original poetry and original
revelation, Romanticism contained an important consolation, in the
area of the philosophy of history, for the age to which it had to
recommend itself: the consolation of the guarantee that mankind did
not have to be deprived entirely, in its substance and its potential, of
what it had once been. This is also something belonging to the nature
of myth-the suggestion of repeatability, of a 're-cognition' of ele-
mentary stories, which approaches the function of ritual, by which
the inviolable regularity of actions that are pleasing to the gods is
secured and imprinted on the mind.
With his "Talk on Mythology," published in 1800, Friedrich Schlegel
not only stamped the Romantic conception of myth but also freed it
from the anti-Enlightenment schema of a history of decline. This
"Talk" is the second theoretical excursus inserted into his Dialogue on
Poetry, and is delivered by the figure of Ludovico, who is characterized,
at his introduction, as one who "with his revolutionary philosophy
pursued annihilation on a grand scale."2 When the representative of
the age who is typified in this way speaks of a "new mythology," and
makes it his program, the theory of myth transforms itself into a
myth. This revolution becomes the recurrence, under a new name,
of the primeval, which cannot have a position in history as it is, but
instead has to become a 'fixed point' over against it. Myth permits
one to take a stand outside history not only as its onlooker but also
as one who can enjoy the use of its oldest properties. In Inyth, the
62
Part I
mythologist's imagination narrates its 0\.Vn history, the cosmogony by

which it emerged from chaos with the aid of Eros. This is why there
can be a 'new myth' whenever the poetic imagination comes to itself
and this, its own story, becomes its subject.
What is characteristic even of 'programmatic' myth is that it is not
proposed without totality and below the level of a pretension to totality:
It asserts that what at present is called "physics" has lost this very
totality, has reduced itself to "hypotheses" and thereby forfeited 'in-
tuition, 'a which should not be abandoned in any relationship to nature.
If hypothesis were supposed to have taken the place of myth, and
physics that of the genealogy of the gods, then it would nevertheless
be-once again-understanding of the ultimate intention of hypothesis
that reveals the possibility of a "new mythology." The decisive move
is concealed in the seemingly naive rhetorical question: "Why should
what has once been not come alive again?"3 If the Enlightenment had
inquired about what should not come alive again, and equipped it
with all the attributes of obscurity and terror, the Romantic sees himself
as obliged to prove that the sort of thing that he longs for as a new
reconciliation of science and poetry has already existed as a phenom-
enon that is simply repeatable.
In his early years, the same Friedrich Schlegel who was to discover
the poetry of archaic myth had had less comforting thoughts about
the starting point of human dealings with the divine. The first pre-
sentiment of the infinite and the divine, he wrote, had filled man,
"not with joyful amazement, but rather with savage terror."4 Could
it be that he considered the early poetic phase that he discovered for
Romanticism with his "Talk on Mythology" (or rediscovered, after
Vi co and Herder) as a condition that is already at a distance from the
"savage terror"? For it is undoubtedly an elementary and proven
technique not just to shiver in the dark, but to sing as well.
Since Rudolf Otto, "the holy,"b the quality of the numinous that
appears in men and in things, is something of which the effect, or at
least one effect, is fear- the mysterium tremendum [terrible mystery],
which may be reduced in intensity in the milder forms of awe and
reverence, of wonder and amazement. Precisely to transform the origi-
nal emotional tension of a "savage terror" into distance, to elaborate
it as something concretely perceptible, is part of the function of rites
and of myth-for instance, in the way in which, in ritual, the numinous
object is shown, presented, conveyed in a procession, displayed, or
63
Chapter 3
touched, as when, in one world religion, the goal of the pilgrimage

that is undertaken once in a lifetime is to kiss the holy meteorite in
the Kaaba in Mecca. The center of the numinous sphere not only has
a form and a name but above all is strictly localized, which is important
in defining the direction of prayer, wherever one is in the world.
Too little thought is given to the meaning of such localization for
what is at first the diffuse quality of the numinous. "The holy" is the
primary interpretation of the undefined 'power' [Machtigkeit] that is
assumed and felt to exist on the strength of the simple fact that man
is not the master of his fate, of the duration and circumstances of his
life. When the primary interpretation of undefined 'power' is under-
stood in this way, rites and myths are always secondary interpretations.
Even if the subsequent interpretation of myths is termed "secondary"
in its tum, as a "secondary rationalization"-as a rationalization it
tends, not unambiguously and necessarily, but still in the direction of
what had already been accomplished by the primary interpretation
of undefined 'power.' 'Reason' just means being able to deal with
something - in the limiting case, with the world. If the numinous is
supposed to have been the primary interpretation, it is still already
interpretation and not the thing itself that is interpreted. But we possess
no other reality than the one we have interpreted. It is real only as
the elementary mode of its interpretation, in contrast to what is ex-
cluded from it as 'unreal.'
Now the quality of the numinous is not only 'reduced' [abgebautl
and leveled off, it is also distributed, in accordance with a pattern that
it has in common with polytheism, to objects, persons, directions.
What was originally diffuse gains a well-marked distribution. It is not
an accident that the phenomenological study of religion has derived
its orientation from the institution of the taboo. Here the numinous
quality becomes the guarantee of commandments and prohibitions,
protected precincts, definite rights and prerogatives. The sign of what
was originally and involuntarily terrifying is transfen~ed to what is
appointed to participate in this quality. The mystery cult, for example,
painstakingly imitates the quality of the unknown, even the quality
of what is normally prohibited, but permitted just once for the initiate.
While the 'reduction' function relates to what was originally and
involuntarily uncanny, the function of transfer and simulation affects
things that of themselves neither have this quality at all nor can attain
it, as in the distinction that is accorded to priestly persons, chiefs, and
64
Part I
shamans. We have come closest to a description of this second quality

in the term sanction, as something that rests on an oath, not only
C
because the latter is an institution rooted in religion, but also because

it justifies the unusually high penalites that are prescribed for violation
of the institution or that can be inflicted on sworn persons who lapse
from the role that is defined and protected by it, for example, as
experts, officials, or soldiers. The 'oath of manifestation'd even goes
so far as to require an assertion leading to one's own disadvantage
and injury. But the simulation now consists only in the justification
of the extent of the penalty that the lawgiver considers it legitimate
to prescribe for cases in which the oath is broken.
Ernst Cassirer documented the transition of the experience of nu-
minousness into a regulated institution in a myth that was told by the
Ewe:
When the first settlers arrived in Anvo, it is related that a man saw
a giant baobab tree in the bush. At the sight of the tree he took fright.
He therefore went to a priest for an interpretation of this occurrence.
He was told that the baobab tree was a tro who wished to live with
him and be worshipped by him.5
So his fright, we are told, was the sign whereby the man knew that
such a tro-spirit had manifested itself to him. But this story pushes
two temporal stages together, thus producing an anachronism: The
taking fright at the sight of the tree is already linked to the knowledge
of what to do and who to tum to in the case of such an experience;
the depletion of power is already institutionally regulated.
One should not designate that as pure primitivism. It is also a
phenomenon of delegation, that one asks someone what is to be done,
that one seeks advice, although for us such a situation would have the
character of an extremely individual perplexity [Ratlosigkeit, literally,
"absence of advice," i.e., not knowing who to tum to]. This myth of
the establishment of religion quite unabashedly presupposes the exis-
tence of the priesthood before the moment at which the cult comes
into existence; in other words, it joins the Enlightenment's critique of
religion in its assumption that the priests were the inventors of religion.
Taking fright when confronted with the baobab tree has already become
an admissible event because it is one that is parried by the institution
in advance. As such, it has lost its subjective function of producing
confusion. The position of the priest in the process of the development
65
Chapter 3
of culture becomes clear: While he is not a culture hero who makes

possible or improves human life by a great deed, still he is conceived
in accordance with this mythical prototype. All that he has to do is
to know what is to be done in each case-to have a knowledge the
validity of which consists in the fact that no one can come ~long who
can subject it to 'critique.'
There is no leap involved in placing the great clearings of monsters
from the world, such as are illustrated by the cycle of myths about
Hercules, alongside this simple event. The Ewe's fear when confronted
with the baobab tree, a fear that is hardly intelligible any longer to
the myth hearer, is (as it were) condensed in the images of those
monsters, which, as the form in which the terror of the early times
is embodied, do not make the earth unsafe any longer only because
there was someone who finished them off. The position of these mon-
sters in the system of mythical genealogy is often indefinite; they are
not altogether divine themselves, but they are neighbors of the gods.
In Hesiod's catalog of monsters, Medusa, among the Gorgons, was
mortal, though she came of parents who themselves were immortal.
Only thus does she make it possible to represent fear in its purest
form but still as something that could be overcome. In Ovid, Perseus
ends the story of his victory over the Gorgon by saying that the snake
hair of the severed head, now on Minerva's shield, still terrifies her
enemies: "nunc quoque, ut attonitos formidine terreat hostes, / pectore
C
in adverso quos fecit, sustinet angues" [And now, to frighten her fear-.
numbed foes, she still wears upon her breast the snakes she made].
The inclusion of such prototypes of the fearsome in sculpture and
vase painting is the final step, in which what was overcome, in the
story, is also displayed. The image of Medusa is presented, with a
facial expression of suffering beauty, only from 300 B.C. onward.
Nevertheless, Hesiod's commentator has to make a fine intellectual
effort to make comprehensible the difference between the frightfulness
described in the story and the beauty of the visual representation:
"The idea that beauty, in the extreme, can be lethal, and, in reverse,
that what is lethal can be beautiful, may contribute to this conception;
for the fearsome effect of the Gorgon's head is certainly unforgettable."6
On the other hand Pegasus, the horse who carries Zeus's lightning
and is thus a functionary of his terror, never in ancient times became
the carrier of the poet and of his imagination. Artistic representation
can never keep up with the storyteller's generosity; it reduces Cerberus's
66
Part I
fifty mouths to two or three. Nothing ca!1- be as fearsome in a picture

as in words. Sphinxes and Sirens are aestheticized only at a late date.
The primary process is not destruction by a fearless hero but self-
destruction as a result of the first experience of ineffectiveness: in the
case of the Sphinx, as soon as a man withstands her magic; in the
case of the Sirens, as soon as their song no longer has its intended
effect.
But it is always apparent that these are only rearguard actions in
the world decision that goes against the figures of terror. It was Zeus
himself who conquered the terrible earth-born Typhon, son ofTartarus
with Gaea, and prevented him from exercising the dominion over the
earth to which he was entitled by his ancestry. Only the mopping up
of monsters that is decisive for the world as a whole is the business
of the god. Otherwise it is more that of his potential successor: Hercules
is recognizable, even at a distance, as a threat to Zeus's power when
he approaches very close to the domain of his father's sovereignty
with his slayings, laying low the sacred eagle that Zeus assigns to the
unceasing torment of Prometheus. It is a later harmonization that says
that this was done with Zeus's approval. Originally Hercules in this
situation is already the equal in strength who is close to taking over
from Zeus himself.
Poetry or terror as the original reality of myth - this antithesis is
based on projecting backward: Muses, nymphs, and dryads, as friendly
and uplifting animations of the landscape, direct one's gaze toward a
free and pleasant initial situation; Medusa the Gorgon, Harpies, and
Furies induce a posteriori inferences of a tortured consciousness of
reality and of man's situation in it. Both types of projection presuppose
that late forms of myth exist-aren't merely left over, like prehistoric
tools - that can induce and support those projective conjectures about
beginnings and, above all, motivate our sympathy. Independently of
conjectures about remote times, then, a philosophical theory of myth
must prove itself with respect to the question of whether it can make
comprehensible the effectiveness and the effective power of mythical
elements, both archaic ones and possible newly formed ones. The
weakness of the traditional mythologies [theories of myth], insofar as
they are statements about mythologies as systems of myths, seems
to me to be that they sever the connection between, on the one hand,
the documentable history of the individual myths and, on the other
hand, their original state, prior to all history-and they do this because,
67
Chapter 3
on grounds derived from a philosophy of history, these theories have

assigned myth so definitively to an 'epoch' that everything after that
can only be a specialty of the histories of literature and art. The
identification of myth with 'its' primeval epoch places the accent of
theory on the question-which is inaccessible to us, and consequently
delivered over to speculation - of its origin.
Only if we take into consideration the history of myth, to the extent
that it is not primeval, will we be able to approach the question that
we naturally ask: What after all does the disposition toward mythical
ways of looking at things consist in and why is it not only able to
compete with theoretical, dogmatic, and mystical ways, but actually
increased in its attractiveness by the needs that they awaken? No one
will want to maintain that myth has better arguments than science;
no one will want to maintain that myth has martyrs, as dogma and
ideology do, or that it has the intensity of experience of which mysticism
speaks. Nevertheless it has something to offer that-even with reduced
claims to reliability, certainty, faith, realism, and intersubjectivity-
still constitutes satisfaction of intelligent expectations. The quality on
which this depends can be designated by the term significance [Be-
deulsamkeil), taken from Dilthey.
Erich Rothacker has laid down a "principle of significance. " f Its
purport is that in man's historical world of culture things have 'valences'
for attention and for vital distance different from those they have in
the objective world of things that is studied by the exact sciences, in
which the distribution of subjective value to phenomena that are studied
tends, in the norm, toward zero. Although such indifference on the
part of the analytical observer may never have been realized, historically
or biographically, nevertheless it is part of the ideal of the theoretical
attitude. The theoretical subject is only able to strive for indifference
because it is not identical with the individual subject and its finitude,
but has developed forms of integration that have an open temporal
horizon. 'Significance' is related to finitude. It arises under the imposed
requirement that one renounce the "Vogliamo tutto" [I want every-
thing], which remains the secret drive for the impossible.
The limiting case of significance-or already a case of going beyond
the limit-is the good old 'judgment of taste,' \vhich combines the
pure subjectivity of its origin with the exclusion of dispute that ac-
companies the claim to objectivity that is made and is never fulfilled.
A person \vho finds a work of art beautiful will expect everyone else
68
Part I
to share this judgment, even though he can know, and does know,
that the fulfillment of this expectation will only be a contingent event.
This sort of objectivity is an expression of subjective conclusiveness,
that is, of the unsurpassability of aesthetic determinations. In signif-
icance, the subjective component can indeed be greater than the ob-
jective one, but the latter can never return to zero. As a valence that
was 'thought up,' significance would have to break down. That is
decisively important even for the phenomenon of the simulated new
myth; where it appears, it makes use of the established repertory of
procedures by which to secure an objective foundation, and dresses
its creation up in a more or less ritualized scientific manner, as for
example [Houston Stewart] Chamberlain, [Ludwig] Klages, or Alfred
Rosenberg did, and before them perhaps most clearly Bachofen. So
significance must have its own relationship to reality, a basis that has
the status of reality. Status of reality does not mean empirical de-
monstrability; the place of the latter can be filled by taken-for-grant-
edness, familiarity, having been part of the world from the beginning.
Even when the story of Prometheus is supplemented by the invention
of his return from the Caucasus and his finding shelter in Athens in
his old age, this is based on the unquestionability of the figure, which
is precisely not felt to be something invented.
Significance is one of the concepts that can be explained but cannot,
in the strict sense, be defined. Heidegger associated it, together with
'involvement,' with the 'wOrldhood' of the world, and thus with the
assemblage of being-in-the-world, from which objects, as 'present at
hand' with their properties, must first be detached before one can
bring to them a theoretical interest that is no longer subjectively
'owned. 'g Equipping something with significance is not something that
we can choose to do. Even granting that man makes history, still there
is at least one of its side effects that man does not make; this is the
'charging' of constituent parts of the human world with significance.
Whatever it may arouse-reverence, astonishment, enthusiasm, re-
jection in different degrees of intensity and in the form of unprovable
damnatio memoriae [rejection from memory], exertions to expel it from
the collective consciousness, museum custody, officially organized con-
servation-all of these are ways of dealing with what is significant,
and differ from the obligatory uniformity with which sciences administer
and categorize their objects. Goethe gave its name to the "imprinted
form" [gepragte Form] that "through its life evolves, "h and Jacob Burck-
hardt, following him, spoke of the "royal right of the imprinted form."
This includes everything that possesses 'pregnance, 'i as opposed to
indifference, but also as opposed to the overwhelming evidence of,
say, the mystical event. As with the aesthetic object, part of the def-
inition of significance is the way it emerges from the diffuse surrounding
field of probabilities. History, like life, works against the tendency of
a situation to be increasingly determined by probability, against the
"death instinct" as the point toward which the leveling-off process
converges. The outcomes and artifacts of history impress us as notions
that one wouldn't have believed any brain capable of. Pregnance is
resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion; resistance
especially to time, which nevertheless is suspected of being able to
produce pregnance through the process of aging. This suggests a con-
tradiction, or at least a difficulty.
I want to illustrate the difficulty by means of the comparison with
which Rothacker tries to make plausible the relationship between preg-
nance and time: "The imprinted forms have a quite singular durability,
inflexibility. The imprint is not easy to obliterate. Once the imprinted
forms are there, they are difficult to alter. ... Their being imprinted
and even the tangibility that is added to that have a conserving effect.
Thanks to this they stand firm in the temporal flux, just as stones
simply outlast the passage of time. Stones over which the mountain
torrent flows stand still, they are there. The water flows, the stone
stands still. It is true that stones can be worn away by water, but that
takes quite a long time; they may also be carried further along, they
may also be hit by rocks that are rolling with them and be damaged,
but they have durability in time."7 To be sure, Rothacker immediately
reduces his claim, saying that the image of the stone and the mountain
torrent exaggerates the duration of the imprinted forms somewhat:
They are not as firm as stones, only much firmer than the sand castles
that summer vacationers make on the ocean beach.
But the image is not only too strong, it is positively vvrong. Time
does not wear away instances of pregnance; it brings things out in
them - though one may not add that these things were 'in them' all
along. Tha t holds, in the case of myth, least of all for extensions.
When Albert Camus said of Sisyphus that one should iInagine hilTI as
being happy, the change of 'sign' was an increase in the visibility of
the myth's potential. When Paul Valery 'corrected' the Faust story by
suggesting that the only way we could picture the one who had once
70
Part I
been tempted, now, was as himself tempting Mephistopheles, some-

thing became perceptible that simply could not have been made up
and added on, but was irresistibly drawing near as the classical demon
figure grew increasingly inferior. These figures have their history even
in the modem age, and Valery wanted to gain by force the position
of having told their story for the last time. But the configuration that
had gained its stature in the course of four centuries only gained in
dimension once again. There is no trace of grinding away by time
here. That would in any case also presuppose that all the depth of
relief had been thought out and implanted in the figures at the
beginning.
One may ask what are the means of operation with which significance
'works,' and with which work on significance is done. If I list some
of them, no claim to comprehensiveness is implied. But some can be
named in place of all (and in place of those that are less common and
less effective); simultaneity, latent identity, the closed-circle pattern,
the recurrence of the same, the reciprocity between resistance and
heightened existence, and the isolation of a thing or action, in the
degree of reality ascribed to it, to the point of excluding every competing
reality.
It may be desirable to provide a more detailed example of latent
identity, one that also, in a subtle way, demonstrates the element of
the closed circle. In doing so it is unavoidable that instead of archaic
evidence we must accept material that is closer to us in time, that is
not mythical by virtue of the epoch from which it derives but which
nevertheless tends toward the qualities of myth-so that it is also
alwa ys evidence for the proposition that the phenomenon of myth
could not be brought to an end with the protophilosopher's exclamation
that now everything was full of gods.
On December 17, 1791, Goethe's play Der Gross-Cophta [The supreme
magician] received its first performance, in Weimer. Its material was
taken from the "famous necklace story" of 1785, which had connected
the charlatan Cagliostro and the queen, Marie-Antoinette, in such an
infamous mannerj that to Goethe's eyes the abyss of the coming rev-
olution had opened for the first time and had driven him into a crazy
kind of behavior that was incomprehensible to those around him.
Nevertheless the first thing to emerge from the affair was to be the
libretto of an opera buffa, "which seems to have been the real purpose
71
Chapter 3
of the event," as he writes from Rome to the Zurich composer Kayser

on August 14, 1 787.
Three months after its first performance, on March 23, 1792, Goethe
tells the duke's mother's regular Friday gathering about his experience
during his journey to Italy five years before, when he sought out the
family of the conjurer, Cagliostro. He reported this episode in the
second part of the Italian journey, and in 181 7 added a reference to
the intervening publication of the documents of Cagliostro's trial in
Rome. One can feel a reluctance, in this retrospective remark, to
expose the connection that he had staged (not without use of the
embarrassing means of artfulness and deception) between the figure
who had entered history with such fateful results and the simple family
in Palermo: "Only now, when the whole affair is closed and beyond
discussion, can I bring myself to complete the official document by
telling what I knoW."8 It may be that only the downfall of Napoleon
made it possible for Goethe to report on this involvement with the
background of the hated revolution before its outbreak, during his
last period of happiness in Italy.
Of Goethe's first narration of the story, in the intimate circle of the
Friday gathering, a quarter of a century before its publication, we
have the report of Karl August Battiger, which contains at the end a
small but (here) decisive addition to its content. 9 During his stay in
Palermo in 1 787, Goethe had heard that Cagliostro's family lived
there, in the most miserable circumstances. In the course of the trial
[in Paris] the French court had undertaken inquiries regarding the
adventurer's origins, and Goethe was able to search out the advocate
who had carried them out. He had himself introduced to the mother
and sister as an Englishman who could give them an accurate account
of Cagliostro's release from the Bastille and of his successful escape
to England. The sister, a poor widow with three grown children, now
tells how grieved she was that her magnificent brother, at the time
of his last departure into the great world, had borrowed thirteen ducats
(in the later text of the Italian journey, fourteen ounces) from her in
order to redeem his pawned things, and up to the present date had
not paid his debt. Goethe's traveling funds are not enough to allo\v
him immediately to make good the small amount on the pretext that
he \vill get the money back from her brother in England.
The author of the report adds that what could not be done then
was done frorn Weirnar after Goethe's return. Goethe had the lnoney
72
Part I
conveyed to the family by an English storekeeper in Palermo, and she

who was provided for thought that the money had really been collected
by the foreigner from her brother in England. The money arrived at
Christmastime, and both mother and sister credited the Christ child
with moving the heart of the fugitive. This stands in the letter of
thanks that both of them addressed to Cagliostro and that came into
Goethe's hands by way of the middleman. Goethe read it to the
gathering, together with the other letter (which he had not delivered)
from the mother to the son. When the master trickster of the century
is finally put on trial in Rome, Goethe cannot continue his assistance
to the family without revealing the truth: "Now, since they have been
informed of the imprisonment and sentencing of their relative, all I
can do is to contribute something to their enlightenment and to their
consolation. I still have in my hands a sum for them, which I intend
to send them, advising them at the same time of our true relationship."
Bottiger passes on the conjecture, which one member of the Friday
circle expressed, that this was the fee that Goethe had received from
the publisher Unger, in Berlin, for the Gross-Cophta. Bottiger agrees,
remarking that to him this is probable for other reasons as well:
" ... and thus it would indeed be very singular that a sum of money
that was earned by means of a play that scourges Cagliostro's frauds
and brazen impudence was conveyed to the same Cagliostro's old
mother and helpless sister in Palermo for their comfort, and that both
things were done by one and the same German."
Plainly, for the biographical or realistic consideration of what Goethe
himself describes, with one of the phrases he used for cases of'sig-
nificance,' as "a singular adventure," the latent identity of the money
is unimportant. His listeners could not know the subjective importance
of the story, which depends on the presentiments of 1785. For them
it acquired its significance from the closing of the circle by which,
through a series of metamorphoses, something that had had its be-
ginning in Palermo returned there. By this means not only was Giuseppe
Balsamo's unscrupulousness toward his mother and sister made up
for, but a side product of the great world-historical scandal was returned
(independently of the scandal's consequences) to that poor comer of
Sicily, by way of the poet.
In the same year in which he told this story to the Friday gathering
in Weimar, Goethe came into contact, through the campaign in France,
with the main line of history, with what the affair of the necklace had
73
Chapter 3
turned into in the course of only seven years. Nor, in his account of
the campaign, does he fail to avail himself of the strongest mythical
means by which to express his fear, and at the same time his way of
mastering it: "In the year 1785, the affair of the necklace already
terrified me, as though it were the Gorgon's head ... and all the
subsequent events, from this time on, unfortunately confirmed my
terrible presentiments all too well. I carried them with me to Italy
and brought them back in even more intense form." He had only just
finished Tasso when "the world-historical present" began to fully engage
his spirit. To provide hilTIself with consolation and entertainment in
this situation, he tried, in the form of the comic opera that had been
in his mind for a long time, "to extract a merry side from this monster."
His effort at merriment proved unsuccessful, all the more so as the
composer Reichardt's did too. Thus it became a play with a sharply
negative effect: "A fearsome and at the same time a bad-tasting subject,
treated daringly and unsparingly, it frightened everyone; no heart
found it sympathetic. ... " The public was put off, there was little
comprehension, and the poet even took secret pleasure "when certain
people, whom I had often enough seen exposed to deception, boldly
assured us that one could not be deceived by such gross means." I 0
The search into Cagliostro's family background has a different
meaning for the listeners from the one it has for him who gives the
account of it. For them it was sufficient to conjecture the latent identity
between the assistance and the publisher's fee. For Goethe something
else was also involved: the sobering of his relationship with Lavater,
\vho was one of those who had been deceived by the supposed miracle
worker Cagliostro, because they were all too ready to give credence.
About the time of the writing of the Sicilian section of the Italian
journey, Goethe looks back, already with finality and with all the distance
one feels toward a debacle, on the failure of the century of the Enlight-
enment' which had first showed itself symptomatically in the success
of figures like Cagliostro. One of the absurdities was that only the
trial in Rome put an end to the deceptions: "Who would have thought
that Rome, of all places, would contribute so much to the enlightenment
of the world and the complete unmasking of an impostor. ... " What
had come to light there redounded upon a public that ilnagined itself
already enlightened. The extract from the records of the trial was "a
fine document in the hands of any sensible reader. For years \YC had
74
Part I
to look on in dismay while the deceived" the half-deceived and the

deceivers worshipped this man and his conjuring tricks, prided them-
selves upon their association with him, and from the height of their
credulous conceit pitied, if they didn't scorn, common sense." Here
one can discern even embitterment on the part of one who must
immediately, and not without reference to himself, append the question
that, continually recurring, formulates the worrisome aspect of having
a share in historical blame, as a result of having let things pass: "Who
did not prefer to keep silent during those times?"l)
The Kampagne in Frankreich [Campaign in France] was written years
later, again, than the Italian journey, and again the description of the
discomfort that Goethe had felt around the middle of the eighties-
and later recognized as a historical faculty for sensing the imperceptible
transition from foolishness to delusion, from imagination to crime-
is intensified: "I had had unhappy occasion, for many years, to deplore
the trickery of audacious visionaries and enthusiasts by design, and
had wondered, with aversion, at the incomprehensible delusion of
excellent people when confronted with such impudent importunities.
Now the direct and indirect consequences of such follies lay before
me as crimes and semicrimes against majesty, all of them sufficiently
effective, when taken together, to shake the finest throne on earth."
It was the most extravagant refutation of the supposed success of the
Enlightenment-and its most refined punishment-when Cagliostro
entered Paris in 1781 and celebrated triumphs of the most absurd
sort, among them the conjuring up of the spirits of Voltaire, Diderot,
and d' Alembert.
The appearance of meaningful things in reality as a product of
physical processes is improbable. That is why improbable distinctly
marked [ausgepragt] forms become indications of meaningfulness. In
the most familiar case: natural beauty, which can be mistaken not for
the beauty of art but for artificiality. Perhaps symmetry is the ele-
mentary example of a figure that resists interpretation as accident,
that suggests meaning but that is not yet aesthetic. We no longer
perceive this immediately, because we inhabit a world of technical
mass distribution that conceals the concentrated improbability of the
appearance of symmetries. But we still notice such symptoms when
they consist in the unexpected coincidence of events, in the self-closing
of a circle of vital events, or in the latent identity of things, persons,
even of fictive subjects, across wide stretches of space or time.
75
Chapter 3
There is never anywhere a lack of readiness to acquiesce In the

suggestion that what is apparently meaningless contains meaningful-
ness. It does not have to take as much shape as the question, What
does that mean? It already means, without any 'what.' When the
faithless son and brother, precisely by means of his infamous deeds
and (what is still more) through the agency of a poet, pays his debt,
which he has certainly long since forgotten, by providing, through his
entirely unintended intervention in history, the material for a theater
piece - then that is a concentration of circumstances that could not
ha ve been anticipated but that nevertheless proves to be possible.
Fictional materials cannot achieve this suggestion of meaning; but the
significance of myth is not recognizable as something fictional, because
it has no nameable author, because it comes from afar and does not
lay claim to a particular chronological position.
Significance is generated not only by intensification but also by
power depletion. By intensification, as a supplement to positive facts,
to naked data: as the not merely rhetorical enrichment of the facts
of the case; and by power depletion as the moderation of something
intolerable, the conversion of something unnerving into a source of
forward pressure and movement. What Goethe accomplished between
the near .insanity of his glimpse into the abyss in the necklace affair
in 1 785; its first working up in Sicily in 1 787, the moral improvement
of his curiosity (after his return to Weimar) by the solace he provided
to the Balsamo family, and the theatrical transformation of the material,
and, finally, the late reversion to the events in the second part of the
Italian Journey in 181 7 and in the Campaign in France of 1824, was the
depletion of the power of something that had unnerved him dan-
gerously. The world around him, on the other hand-his audience in
the Friday gathering in 1792-perceives the significance as an inten-
sification of events that were banal in themselves by latent identity
and the closing of a circle, as a result of a slllall supplementary as-
sumption about the publisher's fee. For they had not participated in
the outbreak of the primary alarm; in fact they had observed it
uncomprehendingly.
Significance also arises as a result of the representation of the re-
lationship between the resistance that reality opposes to life and the
summoning up of energy that enables one to measure up to it. The
reason why Odysseus is a figure of mythical quality is not only that
his return to his native place is a movement of the restoration of
76
Part I
meaning, presented according to the patt~rn of the closing of a circle,

which guarantees the tenor of the world and of life as order against
any semblance of accident and arbitrariness. He is so also because he
accomplishes his homecoming against the most incredible resistances,
and indeed not only those of external adversities but also those of
internal diversion and silencing of all motivation. The mythical figure
imprints on the imagination something that, as an omnipresent ele-
mentary fact of the life-world, becomes accessible to conceptual for-
mulation only at a late stage: the enhancement of the value of the
goal of an action by a mere increase in the difficulty of carrying it
out.
In the process, something of what is iconically represented goes
over into the way in which one is affected by the icon. It is not only
that we apprehend [ergreifen1, in the myth of Sisyphus, what the single
reality that is imposed on an individual has to mean to him-the
reality of the block of stone that he rolls up the mountain and that
always rolls back, pushing him down it-we also are struck [ergriffen1
by the fact that in the image we grasp something that the concept of
'reality' is too pale and general to represent to us. It consists, here,
in perceiving, in the extreme case of mythical inescapability, what it
means for something to determine the character of a person's existence.
Georg Simmel already described this under the heading of 'significance'
at the tum of the century, in connection with the subject of value:
"Objects are not difficult to acquire because they are valuable, but
we call those objects valuable that resist our desire to possess them.
Since the desire encounters resistance and frustration, the objects gain
a significance that would never have been attributed to them by an
unchecked will. "12 Value is a specific functional form of significance,
one that tends toward the objectification of comparison and thus of
the possibility of exchange, without ever entirely giving up the subjective
element that is contained in the 'felt' value of something that is desired.
Sisyphus is a mythical figuration of futility from which we could also
grasp, and perhaps only at a late date, the importance of not being
occupied and possessed by reality only, and only by a single reality
at that, but rather of enjoying a moderate realism. Odysseus is a figure
of the suffering that culminates in success, but for that very reason
he is exposed to criticism and correction, first by the Platonists, then
also by Dante, and most of all by the modem despisers of the 'happy
77
Chapter 3
ending,' as a symptom of a possibly 'whole' [heil] world-with a sidelong

glance at the 'happiness' of Sisyphus.
Stoicism's allegorical interpretation already fundamentally disdained
Odysseus's homecoming and only looked at the Odysseus who was
not overcome by external fortunes and internal weaknesses: This was
how the wise man had to live, even without the agreeable and en-
ervating addition of the homecoming. This is why even eato can be
a more indisputable model of the wise man than Hercules or Odysseus. 13
To the Neo-Platonist, Odysseus's return to his earthly homeland of
Ithaca no longer seems adequate to his endless afflictions; the basic
rnovement of existence has become one of flight from the earthly
assignment of sense, so that it now seems more nonsense than sense
to return to the place from which one set out. But this remains the
image for flight to a place that is held to be in a higher sense one's
place of origin. Thus even flight is still a return home. It flees the
shadow and seeks what casts it, so as not to suffer the fate of Narcissus,
who confused the reflection on the surface of the water with reality
and thus plunged into the depths and drowned. 14
In order to bring about this correction of the Odyssey, Plotinus makes
a montage with a quotation from the Iliad. When Agamemnon advises
breaking off the struggle for Troy, he cries, "Let us flee then to the
beloved Fatherland!" Plotinus puts this in Odysseus's mouth when he
is supposed to leave Circe and Calypso, who are allegories here of
the beautiful world of the senses: Odysseus was "not content to linger
for all the pleasure offered to his eyes and all the delight of sense
filling his days. The Fatherland to us is There whence we have come,
and there is the Father. "15 It is instructive to note that the utterance
cannot remain attached to its original bearer. It has to migrate to the
prototype having the higher mythical pregnance. This also- the vio-
lence in quoting Homer, which the Egyptian Greek, Plotinus, cannot
have taken lightly-is work on myth: The Odysseus configuration
alone, without the superimposition of the resignation before Troy,
could not enable Plotinus to indicate the "basic tone of his entire
philosophy" by referring to the myth. 16 That just isn't mere decoration
or mere appeal to authority: It is the invocation of a commonly relied
upon authoritative agency [Instanz] to certify the human experience
t h at supports a "system.
The New Testament parallel to the Odyssey was the parable of the
prodigal son. This too is the story of the closing of a far-extended
78
Part I
circle, of which the point that is most distant from the beginning is
designated by the words: "I will arise and go to my Father." The
parable is only found in Luke, in the very Gospel that the Gnostic
Marcion was to make the sole Gospel, delivered to Paul, who for him
was the sole apostle.
This parable in particular, of the return home to the 'father,' was
one that Marcion could not admit as genuine: His foreign god saves
beings who are entirely foreign to him, having been created by the
god of the world. The absolutism of grace that Marcion puts in charge
in his story of salvation derives its rigid purity precisely from the fact
that it is not a father who takes an interest in his lost children and
wins them back to himself by the sacrifice of his only begotten son;
instead it is a divinity who owes the world absolutely nothing and, in
Epicurean distance, has no concerns, who by an acte gratuit ["gratuitous
act": Gidel interests himself in man. It is not the establishment or
reestablishment of a pattern of meaning for the world and for life,
but an impenetrably heterogeneous intervention, a legal transaction
in which one god pays a blood ransom to another. Those who are
saved do not return home; they depart into an unknown and undefined
distance, into the third heaven that Paul had seen open. The unknown
is a source of salvation for the children of the god of the world only
because anything must be a source of salvation for them that does
not belong to this world and to its cosmocrator [world ruled.
Whatever is identified as having the quality of a homeland becomes
the epitome of what one turns away from. The same passage that
the Bible critic Adolf von Harnack had retained as the only original
piece of the New Testament texts, not reducible by analysis of sources,
was a passage he was forced to see Marcion, the rigorist whom he
admired and stylized as the forerunner of Luther, abandon to the
dross of Judaizing adulterations.
The Middle Ages had to go even a step further in the deformation
of the plan of the Odyssey. Here least of all could it be believed that
return to man's earthly home might represent his wholeness [or "sal-
vation": Heil]; redeemed man is destined for a higher happiness than
merely returning to the point of departure of his fall. But the explosion
of the figure is assisted by a further element as well, the absence of
the decisive presupposition of a Platonic interpretation: In order to
describe the story of the soul as a cyclical detour, a symmetrical drama,
one had to ascribe preexistence to the soul. This was the way in which
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Chapter 3
Platonism had still been able to close the circle. Seen in the medieval
manner, Odysseus can no longer represent the new salvation, but only
the old wickedness. In Dante he becomes the figure of senselessness,
fallen into the power of curiosity about the world. 17
Even if the myth, in order to illustrate this, had to be completely
distorted, it nevertheless remained, precisely on account of this pressure,
the unsurpassable means by which to express the epoch's incipient
doubt about the finality of its horizon and its narrowness. Choosing
the most daring adventurer as a figure of the Inferno, Dante ventures
the most daring variant of the myth: He does not have Odysseus
return to his homeland, but instead makes him push on beyond the
bounds of the known world, past the Pillars of Hercules and out onto
the world sea. There he disappears from view into the uncertain,
driven by his unbridled craving for knowledge and abandoned to his
final shipwreck against the mountain Eden, which is supposed to unite
the earthly paradise and purgatory.
If Dante wanted to provide his age with a way of expressing what
were still perhaps its hidden desires with the accent on their thoroughly
bad character, the easiest way to do this was to let his readers perceive
the thrust that was necessary in order to break open the circular
pattern of the Homeric nostos [return home] at the height of the world-
spanning adventure. Dante saw Odysseus more with the eyes of a
Roman, and of Virgil's Aeneid, than anything else. For it was the
cunning of the Greek that had brought about the destruction of Troy
and had driven Aeneas to journey to Latium and found Rome, or
refound Troy in a foreign country. This was the Roman recasting of
the homecoming myth. It already fundamentally excluded any right
to a nostos on Odysseus's part. In Dante this fate does not end on
Ithaca, nor even on the open world sea, but rather in the eighth circle
of the Inferno. In the chasm of the deceivers, Virgil, the heir of the
fate of Troy, confronts the flickering double flame of Odysseus and
Diomedes.
What sort of Odysseus was possible from this time onward? On
December 25, 1796, again in the Friday gathering, Goethe reads froln
Hermann und Dorothea. Battiger, on whom we rely again as reporter,
writes in this connection that the poem's plot is so simple "that it is
scarcely possible to tell it without boredom. "Ill But in this "seemingly
simple, commonplace story," Goethe was so "Homerically grand and
new" that it would have to become a people's poem [Volksgedicht1. The
80
Part I
commonest understanding would be sensi~ive to it, the most practiced

and learned would admire it. The Homeric quality of the poem was
that it was based "on a colossal foundation: on the French Revolution."
Besides, it portrayed effects the extent and power of which could only
be completely judged after decades. "It was only through this terrible
and unique ruin of countries that this poem became possible; and yet
one sees the terrors only from a distance, one hears the storm only
behind the mountains, one is never disturbed in the happiest enjoyment
of one's secure present situation." The order to which the poetry
belonged was not national but human. This justifies Battiger in using
the greatest analogy: "It is the only Odyssey that still seemed possible
in our times." But he sees the comparability above all in the way in
which individual fates are bound up with the mighty background of
world history, in the former case the history of the struggle of the
two halves of the world with one another, in the present case that of
the rising tide of war and emigration resulting from the Revolution.
Battiger does not consider the relationship of the contemporary pattern
of fate to that of the mythical heroes. The short formula for that could
be: Dorothea, the refugee, finds a homeland in a foreign country
through Hermann's wooing. The subject of the poem is homecoming
despite the impossibility of return. Dante had not been able to furnish
his doubly guilty Odysseus with this fulfillment.
Finally, James Joyce's Ulysses. In relation to its nominal prototype
it stands, not only temporally but also according to its own assignment
of roles, at the opposite end of world literature. This epic of episodes
is a monument of the contradiction of everything that had come down
from its namesake. Even the titles of the episodes, modeled on those
of the Odyssey, were dropped in the final version. Nevertheless, what
was not least a result of the inability to maintain the identity of a
figure throughout does unintentionally comply \vith its archaic reference
subject. The latter also had no basis for the unity of its spontaneous
elements, no constancy of physiognomic definition, although Joyce
himself says that what always fascinated him was the "character of
Odysseus." But the fate of the mythical wanderer has little to do with
his character; it is the result of the division of powers, of the fluctuation
of the forces that hold sway over it. Joyce says that his intention was
"to transpose the myth sub specie temporis nostri. "19 These were not so
much the adventures of a person; rather, each adventure, so to say,
was a person. For this the connoisseur of Scholastic subtlety finds the
81
Chapter 3
most striking possible comparison, by alluding to Thomas Aquinas's

doctrine of the identity of individuality and species in the angels. The
episodes are originally discontinuous with one another and "only fuse
after a prolonged existence together." He will repeat that statement
with regard to Finnegans Wake: "These are not fragments but active
elements and when they are more and a little older they will begin
to fuse of themselves. "20
If significance has to be wrung from the indifference of space and
time, Joyce does this by reducing the spatiotemporal framework-in
ironic contrast to Homer's expenditure of the world and time - to the
arbitrariness of an exactly dated day in June 1904, and to the pro-
vincially out-of-the-way city of Dublin, the "center of paralysis," as
he called it. For the reader there was no way definitely to possess the
knowledge that an acquaintance with Joyce's correspondence con-
tributes toward reducing the contingency of the date. June 16, 1904,
is the day on which Joyce first goes for a walk in Dublin with Nora
Barnacle, who later becomes his wife. She will never read Ulysses.
The text prevents the reader from sharing this knowledge, which
is only secured by the appended work of philology. For the reader,
the arbitrariness of the single day turns significance into a riddle. Such
contingency practically demands the irony of the mythical vis-a.-vis
the factual: It could also be any other day-and it will be every other
day. This reversal restores the mythical validity. What the author
withholds from the reader, what he expects the reader to accept as
an arbitrary choice, points to an 'everyday' quality that is to be taken
in the literal sense. Timelessness can no longer be represented by any
means except this "a day like any other." Each such day would be
the residue of what had once been a badge of the uniqueness of a
world adventure.
At the end, the Odyssey of triviality that Leopold Bloom traverses
in that single day even refutes the closed circle as a pattern of meaning.
His return home is the least important and consequential station of
all and concludes with the internal monologue of Molly Bloom, ex-
pressing her unaffectedness by this return home. Odysseus/Blooln,
Joyce writes to Frank Budgen on December 10, 1920, "romances about
Ithaca ... and when he gets back it gives him the pip." That \vhich
occupies the position of home refutes what is still called coming home.
The day's tour of this Odysseus is not even turned into an adventure
of the imagination. A scenery of literary allusions and establishments
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Part I
of reference, outside the Odyssey as well, surrounds Bloom's movements

and the places where he stops. The hero has no need for expansion,
whether deriving from desire or from boredom, that can resist the
shrinking of time and the banalizing of the world. This ego did not
really 'set out' [or "put to sea": ausjahrenl and neither, consequently,
does it really return home. The unpublished titles of the episodes have
set in motion and kept in motion the interpreters' efforts to get on
the track of the transformations of the myth. Not only was the exegetes'
existence at stake: It had been put at stake. For it was for them above
all, if not for them alone, that the abundance of connections and
allusions was scattered and concealed.
That is not to deny the greatness of the work. Works of literary
art have never been written for everyone, however glad every author
would have been to be the first to achieve this. Ulysses has to be read
in a way that responds to expectations of integration and exhaus-
tiveness, and can be read in this way only by born hermeneuts. But
in a world in which people are relieved of work by machines, that is
such a large group that it is increasingly worthwhile to write only for
them and according to the rules of their guild. With Joyce, a literature
begins in which even weaknesses in the classical skills of composing,
inventing, constructing, and storytelling have been converted into em-
inent skill in writing for initiates: an industry of production for an
industry of 'reception.' This professional public is prepared for some-
thing that, in the history of mankind, has only been accepted under
the conditions of cults: for boredom.
The seaman's yam from the taverns along the Ionian coast, turned
into hexameters, had been dressed up, for the old Hellenic nobility,
into the Odyssey; Ulysses is elevated out of the vulgar stuff of the Irish
metropolis and, enriched with movable literary scenery, addressed to
the twentieth-century nobility of the desk. Joyce himself repeatedly
declared that what he lacked was imagination. The conduct he expe,cted
of his readers was the same painful exertion that he had spent on
the book: "It is as difficult for me to write it as for my readers to
read it. "21 And: "There never was such a tiresome book, I am sure."22
H. G. Wells will criticize this, in his famous or infamous letter to Joyce
of November 23, 1928, as a disproportionate burden for the reader:
"Your last two works have been more amusing and exciting to write
than they will ever be to read. Take me as a typical male. Do I get
much pleasure from the work? No .... "
This state of affairs stands behind the most daring interpretation
of the modem Odyssey, the one proposed by Wolfgang Iser. He sees
the author as fixed exclusively on his reader and engaged in the
endless task of keeping that reader equally endlessly busy. Only, in
his interpretation, supported by the theory of the implicit reader, Iser
has never asked what kind of contemporary it would have to be who
could match the author's concentration. 23 It is no withdrawal of le-
gitimation from the work if one says that the reader whom it postulates
would already have to be able to remember a world of reading when
reading it. On the contrary, this, precisely, is the utopia behind the
book: the conception of a world in which increasingly the condition
enabling people to be readers of Ulysses is fulfilled. But what a con-
tradiction: The author, who wants, single-handedly, to occupy the
reader for his whole life (and, what is more, for a life of sleeplessness),
already presupposes, for this exclusive relationship, a life's acquired
knowledge of literature for the mere understanding of his riddles and
mystifications, his allusions and reclothings.
The fact that the author occupies his reader so tyrannically does
not mean that he grants him pleasure. Iser seems willing to accept
this. What Joyce has in mind is the professional 'recipient,' which
makes him- according to the remark transmitted by his biographer,
R. Ellmann-see the professors occupied for centuries with the riddles
in Ulysses. For this, he said, was the only way to secure immortality
for its author. In contrast to this, Iser's answer to the question of the
author's intention seems to soften the issue, if not render it harmless:
That intention is directed, he says, at the reader's power of imagination.
But this power of imagination, if one follows Iser's description, must
first and last be entitled labor power. It is dominated by a single
motive, that of the horror vacui [fear of a vacuum]. The novel's numerous
allusions to the epic do not become clear; rather they lead one astray.
For Iser they are empty forms [Leerformenl with indicators for the
distribution of roles - forms that the reader has to enter into. But
would he enter into them if they didn't already have their imprinted
significance? Rather than to the lacunae and inconsistencies and breaks
in style of the modem work, don't they refer us away from this \\lork
and its incapacity for meaning, toward a no longer realizable ground
plan in which meaning is validated?
FrOIn the distance of an unalla yed nostalgia, Joyce described the
city of his father and, in it, the inconsequential daily tour and return
84
Part I
home of the petit bourgeois, Leopold Bloom. He always speaks, too,

of its lack of proportion to the unaccomplished and unaccomplishable
return home of James Joyce. For Leopold Bloom, unlike Homer's
Telemachus, does not seek a father but a son. This inversion in relation
to the reference myth seems to me to be the key to Ulysses. Precisely
in that case, however, the fulfillment is already sure to dissolve. For
when Bloom has brought home Stephen Dedalus, whom he has found
again, the reader must learn from Molly Bloom's 'internal monologue'
that Penelope is already meditating infidelity with the stranger. This
offense against the Homeric ethos is probably the most insidious form
of the refusal of meaning. Its irony is only recognizable, in the coun-
termove to the mythical superelevation of the closing of the circle, as
the piercing mistrust with which Joyce torments himself by doubting
his exclusiveness for Nora after that June 16, 1904, when she had
simulated innocence with the question "What is it, dear?"k
The "implied reader" who is created by Iser's theory and implanted
in Joyce's intention is the return of the 'creative subject' on the other
side, that of reception. Joyce's reason for no longer telling stories
(regardless of the fact that the only reason for his not doing it was
that he could not) would have been to let the reader's function, the
function of making a story for himself out of given determinants,
dawn on him. In case the reader succeeded, would the ambush of
countermanding signals already be laid-would the refusal of meaning
have jumped over from the Bloom who comes home and brings
Stephen home to the subject of 'aesthetic experience'? It may be the
case that confidence in his creative power is the appropriate consolation
for the perplexed reader, who is supposed to impress himself to the
point of being able to become his own demiurge. As an intention, it
contradicts Joyce's whole consciousness of himself-the Joyce who
saw himself as the creator behind his creatures, and enjoyed this in
front of everyone, in solitary uniqueness, by making those creatures
into the riddle of a future audience that could be won all the more
certainly by the refusal of meaning. In spite of all his ridicule of the
official God, he had an implicit one, and that god's attribute was that
of evading questioning about the meaning of his decrees. Through
the procedure of reversal the author, who does not allow himself to
be questioned either and who lets this be known by his mystifications
and deceptions, is promoted to the rank of a god or into the position
of his god. What we are dealing with is a myth of the author, not
85
Chapter 3
with that of his reader. It is difficult to imagine Joyce tolerating the

reader as another god alongside himself, to say nothing of installing
him himself.
In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dedalus discusses with
Lynch questions about art and art forms: "The artist, like the God of
the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his hand-
iwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fin-
gernails. "24 This only moves his companion to a remark about the
disproportion between this "prating about beauty and the imagination"
and the "miserable Godforsaken island" on which it is done: "No
wonder the artist retired within or behind his handiwork after having
perpetrated this country." Was this frivolous reversal of the metaphor
of the artist as God meant to reflect on the aesthetic deiculus [little
god] who leaves the reader to repair the effects of his impotence in
his work, or even to produce a world from nothing but 'empty forms'?
This could only run against the grain of the "artist as a young man,"
who wants to have made his work himself and alone, in order, in-
different to its quality, to disappear behind it.
That the intention that Joyce himself defined, to "transpose the
myth sub specie temporis nostri," had to relate less to the material than
to the formal structure of myth is the upshot of Ulysses. This can already
be grasped from the fact that he immediately frees himself from the
cyclical schema, denying its capacity for renewal, as something excluded
from his sense of life, when he elevates Giambattista Vico to the status
of patriarch of Finnegans Wake. That could have no other meaning
than to put the spiral-Vico's fundamental pattern of history as a
reconciliation of cycle and linearity, a tentative opening up of the finite
scope of history, too, now-in place of the nostos circle. Of course, he
says, he does not take Vico's speculations literally, but uses "his cycles
as a trellis. "25 Joyce had already begun reading the Scienza nuova [New
sciencel when he was in Trieste, and the possibility cannot be excluded
that the dissolution of the Odyssey model, the ironic reversal of poles
of the nostos episodes, is a sign of its pressure on the mythical pattern
of meaning. Still, for his work on Finnegans Wake Joyce made use of
a metaphor for the inevitability of closure, the Inetaphor of tunneling,
in which two companies of diggers work blindly forward from opposite
sides and yet reach the meeting point where they break through.
The cyclical schema had been a basic pattern of trust in the world,
and it is still the same thing when it emerges again as an archaism.
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Part I
The reliability of every path and of each life-fulfillable, after delay,

however much it may be impeded by the gods' division of powers-
is imprinted in advance in the pattern of the closed circle. Even in
the horror of returning to an unknown origin, as in the Oedipus myth,
there is the element of the impossibility of missing it, which points,
even as a degenerate form, to the fundamental pattern of a deeper
precision. Of course it is delusion (ate) that makes one adhere to this
precision; as the doom decreed by the gods, it is the agency by which
meaning is established through hidden processes - a delusion that
seems a mockery of all meaning only to those who are also subjected
to such dooms. Diogenes of Sinope, the first Cynic, gave voice (according
to the testimony of Dio Chrysostom) to the plausible misunderstanding
that this Oedipus was only a simpleton who couldn't get done with
his self-discoveries. Perhaps the Oedipus tragedy that is ascribed to
Diogenes, though called in question by Julian, was a parody-for
nothing else is left when the conditions of seriousness in regard to the
mythical material have failed.
That still holds for the most audacious parody of this material, the
variant- breaking out of the genus of tragedy - in Kleist's Der zerbrochene
Krug [The broken jugl. Both the tragedy and the comedy point to the
same fundamental plan, which one can regard as the pattern of a
theory of punishment, according to which the criminal himself, under
the command of reason, determines and demands his punishment,
and the judge functions as the mere bearer of the mandate of this
reason. Both the accuser and the accused combine, on this assumption,
in one subject, who complies with the idea ofjustice as self-punishment. 26
As the ruler, Oedipus is the judge as well. Like the village justice,
Adam, I he finds himself guilty and must execute against himself the
public reason that he still, apart from this knowledge, represents. The
cyclical structure of the process, which the myth prescribed to both
the tragedy and the comedy, allows the subject, in traversing the
circular track, to see himself as it were from behind - withdra wn, in
this way, from identification, until he catches up with himself.
Sigmund Freud's affinity to myth relates to the mythical cycle in a
multiple concentric fashion. Perhaps it already did this in the Italian
experience that he reports as part of the basis for his concept of the
"uncanny." The weight that he gives to the harmless event by its late
insertion into his own work presupposes that the point to which this
circle, this repetition of the same, returned had a specific 'significance'
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Chapter 3
for him. It was an Odyssey experience of the type described by Joyce.

On a single day in a small provincial town in Italy Freud came into
the "red light district" three times, unintentionally, and the greater
his dismay and his haste to get free of this quarter, the more certainly
the circle closed. Who else but Freud would have experienced that in
this way and would have been able to enact for himself so impressively
the fixation on sexual matters, with this trick of the id? The third
time, "a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny."
He explicitly performs the theoretician's most difficult renunciation,
the renunciation of all further curiosity, in order to get free of the
feeling of a helplessness that is otherwise peculiar to the state of
dreaming. 27 Freud recognized the ambivalence of 'significance' in the
coercive and fateful way in which the closing of the circle is accom-
plished: the uncanny as the inescapable, the meaningful as the un-
mistakable. That must be borne in mind in connection with the renewed
reference to Oedipus.
The Oedipus complex that Freud discovered or invented is not given
that name only because it reflects, on the moderate level of desires,
the murder of one's father and incest with one's mother. It is also,
and above all, given that name because it assumes, as an instinctive
impulse of infancy, an unexpressed inclination to return home to the
mother, in opposition to the centrifugally directed claims of reality,
represented by the father. "Every new arrival on this planet is faced
by the task of mastering the Oedipus complex."28 In other words, he
has to learn not to return home. Or, according to Freud's later insight,
not to return home right away. Freud gained access to this complex
in the course of self-analysis, and first associated it with the myth of
Oedipus in 1897.
Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. Only one idea
of general value has occurred to me. I have found love of the mother
and jealousy of the father in my own case too, and no,\, believe it to
be a general phenomenon of early childhood .... If that is the case,
the gripping power of Oedipus Rex . .. becomes intelligible. . . . The
Greek myth seizes on a compulsion that everyone recognizes because
he has felt traces of it in himself Every member of the audience was
once a budding Oedipus in phantasy, and this dream-fulfillment played
out in reality causes everyone to recoil in horror, with the full measure
of repression which separates his infantile from his present state. 29
88
Part I
It is not a correction of Freud's anamn.esis of the Oedipus myth,

but an observation on his technique of 'reception' if one does not
leave unnoticed the way in which he fails to reproduce the pattern
of the myth. He carried his idea of the mechanism of the genesis of
dreams from censored desires over to myth for the first time in The
Interpretation of Dreams. If Greek tragedy is still able to stir the modem
spectator just as deeply as it did the contemporaries of the ancient
poet, although elements and conditions underlying its material have,
after all, disappeared in the meantime - such as the function of the
gods and above all that of the oracle - then such a continuous readiness
for reception must be connected with the constancy of the substratum
of desires. The poet himself would already have found the material
ready to hand as the result of a process of selection that would always
be traceable to the tabooed desire for incest. But laying stress on this
element, one hits upon neither the core of the myth nor that of the
tragedy. What supports this configuration is not the type of guilt that
Oedipus unknowingly lays on himself through patricide and incest,
but rather the way in which he discovers it. Of course it was meant
to be the worst conceivable crime, but at bottom its casuistry didn't
matter very much. The gods delude man into doing atrocious things
in ignorance and leave it to the infallibility of his fate for him to
discover this and expiate it according to the rules of his reason-which
is more a public than a private reason, so that it is determined entirely
by the act and not by the intention. What is disastrously uncovered
are the past deeds of a king, not the hidden underworld of desires
that belong to a 'psychic apparatus.'
Kleist picked up this 'public' character of the subject; but it is not
an accident that it was now possible only in the form of comedy,
because the post -Christian concept of freedom no longer permitted
one to be guilty of an unconscious action, unless it was in the fonn
of the public scandal of an official administrator of justice. The fact
that religious guilt is of a different type is something that we are
confronted with by the doctrine of Original Sin, which is anachronistic
with respect to this concept of freedom; its type of guilt is closer to
a concept of 'impurity' that someone can incur, with all its conse-
quences, without being guilty of it by his actions.
For the tragedy, too, all that matters is how man can ignorantly
prepare his downfall. Oedipus discovers his guilt, not in a process of
self-examination and self-purification, but rather in pursuit ofms official
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Chapter 3
duty of complying with the oracle that assured the city of Thebes of
freedom from the plague if the murderer of Laius was driven from
the land. To search for this murderer and thus to get on the track of
his own impurity is a political proceeding, not one of self-knowledge
and self-liberation. The atrocities that are attached to Oedipus, more
than being concealed in him, are exceptional in the way in which they
are adapted to the formal schema of the tragedy: The onetime event
that made Jocasta a widow and thus opened the way for Laius's
murderer to come to power at her side establishes the state of marital
happiness between mother and son over the abyss of their ignorance
and sets it in contrast to the public misfortune of the city, which
compels obedience to any instruction that promises to relieve it.
The royal incest on the throne of Thebes, as a mother-son monad,
restores for a moment the real, intact, primeval world, the enticing
image of which stands behind Freud's idea of the traumas and denials
of both ontogenesis and phylogenesis. In the New Introductory Lectures
on Psychoanalysis, in 1932, he still said that only the relationship to her
son brought the mother unrestricted satisfaction and it was "altogether
the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human re-
lationships. "m In the myth it was the oracle, it was affairs of state,
that had put an end to this paradise.
Perhaps the most perfect consistency of the closed-circle pattern of
the instinct to return, in psychoanalysis - the complete figure of the
flight from contingency-was something that could only be accom-
plished symbolically. In his Theory of Genitalityll of 1924 Ferenczi ex-
plained the sexual act as the symbolically successful return of the man,
represented by the penis, into the female genitalia - thus letting the
relation between individuals, in the Oedipus complex, dissolve in the
symbolism of the gender relation. The logic of this conception also
implies that only the death instinct is the final intensification of the
desire to return, and in it the physical nonidentity of what one might
call the "point returned to" succeeds in expressing absolute noncon-
tingency in pure form. The old metaphor of the womb of mother
nature acquires an unexpected reading in the system of these instincts
of flight and return.
The return to the point of departure and to the primeval state,
which is temporarily denied to the individual- and is still more some-
thing that he must deny to himself-he must finally, nevertheless,
accomplish in a more radical form, when he abandons his exposed,
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Part I
improbable state and returns to the physically 'normal' state. He is

only a particle in the stream of the great return that life as a whole-
as the episodic state of exception to the entropy of energy - passes
through. Just this threatening finality had remained forgotten in the
early development of the principle of the constancy of psychic energy
by Freud, and in its application to the psychic apparatus. The model
for this apparatus was the open arc of the transmission of a stimulus
in the organic system- the equalization of energy between the afferent
and the efferent sides with the continual tendency to keep the inner
and bound energy at the lowest possible level. The 'energetical' view
of the psychic realm absorbs the metabolic view of the physical. It
sees the identity of the organic system, maintained at huge expense
against all destructive probabilities, as a form of the flow-through of
matter and energy. This risky outsider status of the organic realm as
a whole is merely reflected in the existence of the individual outside
the uterus, in the risky situation in which he is abandoned to his own
self-preservation and self-determination- this most exposed state, to
return from which can only be the most secret of all wishes, because
it offends against the 'ethics' of effort.
Every theory has the tendency to present itself as capable of broader
application. Thus also Freud's completion of the system of the psychic
instincts with the death instinct is on the verge of a cosmology of the
highest level, the level of Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence." It has the
multiple significance that favors any expansion. With the approach
to the totality that is characteristic of a world view [Weltansicht], and
with the association of the psychic disposition to decay with the ther-
modynamic one, the early discovery-through Freud's self-analysis-
of the impulse of the individual life to retreat takes on the cachet of
a great myth. What he had made into the foundation of his conception
of the psychic apparatus - the return of the level of instinctive energy
to its initial state, through the discharge of excitation - becomes, as
the return of life (both individual and universal) into death as the
predominant 'what came before,' the circularity law of the universe
itself. If one regards what Freud called the "primary process" as the
quickest connection between the exciting stimulus and the free dis-
charge of excitement, then the "secondary process," with its ways of
binding energy, is a still more difficult and risky detour-like life itself,
as a whole, in its relation to its inorganic substratum. The optimal
level of a physical state is that in which it is least endangered. For life
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Chapter 3
it would be the state of its definitive safety - and then all that is left
to say is: life, when one has it behind one.
Freud did not invent the total myth. He found it, in the process of
interrogating the instincts with regard to their functional meaning,
when he finally came to the death instinct. At that point he demoted
the instinct for self-preservation and the instincts for mastery and for
self-assertion to the level of importance of aspects, and incorporated
them into the pattern of 'detours to death.' The new total myth gives
the evolution of the organic world the superficial appearance that a
higher plane of the world process has been arrived at. On the contrary,
as Freud says, it would contradict the "conservative nature of the
instincts" if a state that had never yet been attained were the goal of
the development. Such a telos [goal] of life can only be "an old state
of things, an initial state from which the living entity has at one time
or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the circuitous
paths along which its development leads. "30
It is what Heraclitus first expressed in the paradox that souls delight
in becoming water, although this involves their death; for him even
God has a longing not to be God anymore, and when his longing is
fulfilled, the world comes into being-as it were, as the throwing off
of the burden of being a god. 31 The death instinct is not symmetrical
and of equal rank to the pleasure principle, for it reduces the power
of the latter to an episode. It is absolute, because it implies the at-
tainment of a state of which the degree of security is absolute - that
is, consists simply in no longer being capable of being undercut.
It is not a myth of the eternal return of the same, but rather of
the final return home to the original state. To promise this is the great
temptation of comprehensive theories, the temptation to equal myth
in the production of totality. The death instinct completes this story
of history and pern1eates it with the tenor of the contingency of life,
of its being an exceptional state, and of circumstantiality as its fun-
damental form. The instinct reflects the physical decrepitude in which
organic life returns to its inorganic basis. It thus cOlnpensates for its
improbability, its only being able to maintain itself at the cost, to the
surrounding physical world, of its consumption of energy. The fact
that the second law of thermodynamics is reflected in the psyche as
an instinct constitutes the psychic realm's affinity to the circular structure
of myth. Thus we have a common source and basis for the death
instinct and the Oedipus complex. The latter is not primarily rivalry
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in a libidinous relationship, but the individual's tendency to revert to

his origin, to the womb of his own mother-the evasion of the ex-
penditure that the maturing of individuality requires. Thus the central
mythical figures that Freud reintroduced into general circulation-
Narcissus and Oedipus-are representatives of the 'significance' of
myth itself. For narcissism, too, is a turning back: a turning away from
the reality outside the ego, an avoidance of the expenditure involved
in separation and the energy involved in existence. The death instinct,
the implication of the great myth, reflects on the other tendencies to
return that are characteristic of life, which appears as the redundancy
of a detour from what is not yet to what is no longer. The epitome
of all difficulties is not yet to be what is no longer.
Self-preservation is then a form of the refusal to return to the
original state. If one thinks of Heidegger's analysis of Dasein, which
was presented only a few years after Freud's discovery of the death
instinct, then one is struck by the analogous placement near one
another of "Being toward death" and "guilt" [or "debt": Schuld], this
being called from afar to afar as "Being-the-basis for a being which
has been defined by a 'not.' "0 Freud repeated this same connection
in the dictum "Thou owest nature a death," which is a quotation,
with an important alteration, from Shakespeare's Henry IV: "Thou
owest God a death." Freud had first used it for the dream of the
weird sisters in The Interpretation of Dreams. The configuration of the
three women in a kitchen, one of whom is making dumplings, leads
him back to a memory from his childhood. His mother wanted to
prove to him that man was made of earth and had to become earth
again, by rubbing the surfaces of her hands together and producing
the little rolls of epidermis that children, too, so much enjoy making-
the same motion of the hands that is made by the women in the
kitchen making dumplings. The six-year-old, who at first had doubted
his mother's assertion about the return, capitulates before this de-
monstratio ad oculos [visual demonstration]: " ... I submitted to what I
was later to hear expressed in the words 'Thou owest nature a death.' "
If one views Freud's remark in the light of his own accentuation of
'parapraxes, 'p then owing nature a death is different from owing God
a death. It anticipates the conception, in the great myth of the dualism
of the instincts, that life owes nature death as the reestablishment of
the normal state, as making amends for the huge cost of the energy
expended in self-preservation.
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Under the primacy of the death instinct, the function of the sub-
ordinate component instincts for self-assertion, power, and self-pres-
ervation becomes one of "ensuring that the organism shall follow its
own path to death, and warding off any possible ways of returning
to inorganic existence other than those which are immanent in the
organism itself." One who saw this reordering in the realm of the
instincts before him for the first time could not fail to recognize how
'a story' was in the process of formation here. Basic characteristics of
life that had hitherto been predominant were depleted in power to
the level of merely superficial phenomena. Thus from now on "the
organism's puzzling determination (so hard to fit into any context) to
maintain its own existence in the face of every obstacle" only had to
shield its return home to its origin [ins Authentischel. As is also the case
in myth, the rationality of the shortest path becomes nonsensical-
here, it becomes a temptation that conflicts with the sense of life,
which is to delay the point where it becomes what is no longer.
Rationality, however paradoxical it may sound, would then become
mere instinctiveness. That is the opposite of a refusal that Freud calls
intelligent efforts [intelligentes Strebenl. He himself speaks of the paradox
that the organism defends itself against all influences and threats that
could after all help it to achieve by the shortest path the goal-which
cannot be relativized - of being what is no longer.
Not to choose the shortest path is already the basic pattern of
sublimation. It substitutes for the goals of instinctive energy other goal
conceptions that are marked out by culture. But what is set apart by
culture is what is not included in the death of him who produces it.
That is why culture appears to us as the imperishable things that man
brings forth and leaves behind him, irrespective of what becomes of
man himself- indeed irrespective of what part of it is directed against
man himself. From the point of view of this cosmological speculation,
culture is hypertrophic self-preservation, an artificial asymmetry, to
the disadvantage of the death instinct.
One can perceive immediately the logical advantage of the dualism,
conceded by Freud at such a late date, between the constructive and
destructive energies, the eros and death instincts: Only now can a
story be told that is homogeneously natural history and cultural history,
cosmology and anthropology in one. The immanent tendency of every
theory is toward the principle of unity, the highest rationality that is
possible for it. It was the defection of C. G. Jung that first made the
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Part I
logic of monisms of energy evident to Freud. And still later, namely,

in Civilization and Its Discontents, he acknowledged that the implication
of the identity of the libido with the concept of instinctive energy
really had been inherent in his doctrine.
Freud decisively broke out of the blind alley of the principle of
unity, in order to keep open for himself the possibility of a story-
ultimately, the possibility of a great myth. In hardly any other case
have we had the genesis of a regression to myth before us in such a
transparent form, with all the needs marked out that had been left
unmet when rationality was nearly realized by a monism of energy.
As Freud himself described for us the introduction of the death or
destruction instinct, it was an extremely obscure speculation, for which
he was only able later to hunt up data gathered from analyses. This
statement presupposes that he thought he should only allow himself
to generalize earlier results to the extent that such generalization could
be traced back to the findings of analysis. One may doubt whether
such speculation could ever be held suspended in the heuristic element.
But Freud strictly insists on the principle, which he defends against
Jung, of not abandoning the key of the prehistory constituted by the
individual childhood in favor of phylogenetic prehistory, and not letting
the former serve as a substitute for the latter, rather than the latter
for the former. 32 It is Moses and Monotheism, at the latest, that will show
that there can be collective latencies without evidence from individuals
and that the storing up of a story depends neither on the subjective
unconscious nor on the objective culture alone. Seen from that per-
spective, the question arises whether the theory of the death instinct
does not presuppose a conservative function extending across the
widest latency that is even conceivable. Instincts can only be con-
servative at all because they contain a 'story' [or "history": Geschichtel
"stored up for further repetition," and only by giving "a deceptive
appearance of being forces tending towards change and progress,
whilst in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by
paths alike old and new. "33 The death instinct is conservative because
it has stored up the story of life and, in that story, the latency that
stretches furthest of ali, that of life's derivation from its not-yet-existence
in inanimate nature, in the maternal womb of matter.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle contains, in passing, an objection to
suicide as the "rational," that is, direct, accomplishment of the death
instinct as opposed to its "intelligent," that is, indirect and roundabout,
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Chapter 3
form. Possibly Freud was thinking of the death of his student Victor
Tausk in July 1919. But for this case he had another 'story' in petto,
that of the conversion of instinct. It allowed him to view the event as
indifferently as he was later to be reproached with having done: One
who kills himself, kills himself instead of another, at whom his death
wish was directed. This is another case of what simply abounds in
Freud: a piece of myth, or at least a reproduction of its mode of
thought. The idea that being the addressee of the death wish is some-
thing that can be delegated or transferred had already played a role
in Freud's story of his childhood, in relation to the brother who came
after him. Against it Tausk, with his letter of farewell to Freud-which
is one of the most moving examples of this German genus - did not
have a chance. He wanted to tell the master that there can also be
rationality in the choice of death. It is the fate of myth possessors that
they always know too much to be able to believe that someone con-
ceived of the decision that he himself describes as the "healthiest,
most decent deed" of his life in exactly the way that he avows. 34 Of
course the death instinct had its own logical force in the development
and completion of Freud's total myth; but the point in time, so close
to a catastrophe in which Freud was involved in many ways, may also
have suited his need for consolation, a need that the new dualism of
the system of instincts could satisfy. In Freud, stages of his theoretical
development occasionally take on the function of paratheories that
explain personal defeats or relieve him of personal involvement, if
they don't forbid him such involvement. The success of Freud's myths
is the result of, among other things, the fact that they are the most
complete guidelines to the formulation of excuses that have been
offered since Origen.
Here we have before us the way in which the formal renewal of
myth-as the servicing of the need for significance-works in one of
its few successful cases: It ties acute experiences and important CUITent
events into the context of long familiarity and crea tes prefiguration,
but also a decrease in the expectation of freedom, a decrease in what
is conceded to candor and ultimate self-knowledge, since these come
under the protection of the unrecognized preestablished patterns IVor-
gegebenheiten]. Even where healing is no longer possible, in the case
of suicide, tracing the catastrophe back to the ground plan of an eidet ic
normality of what is fated in any case becomes helpful to the survivor,
as a means of exempting himself froln tralllnatic in1pact. Where Inyth
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Part I
exists, history becomes a failure to fulfill its 'guaranteeing preindication.

What is provided for on the overarching specieswide level of the
instincts is no longer something that we must take in hand and take
responsibility for. Once again the oldest imperative- to be obedient
to nature - proved to be valid: as the device by which to free oneself
from the obligation to make history.
The entire need for significance is based on the indifference [or
"nondifferentiation": IndifJerenzl of space and of time-on the in-
applicability of Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason to space-time
positions, an inapplicability that had driven Leibniz to the step, as
desperate as it was daring, of denying reality to space and time and
making them into mere modes of ordering employed by reason. Myth
doesn't even let indifferences arise. Significance makes possible a 'den-
sity' that excludes empty spaces and empty times, but it also makes
possible an indefiniteness of dating and localization that is the equivalent
of ubiquitousness.
In the case of space, myth can work with the simple means of
distributing the disputed locations of the birth and deeds of its gods
and sons of gods uniformly over the landscape. Christianity found the
most elegant solution by which to avoid the annoyance of the con-
tingency of its saving events in space and time, by making them
representable everywhere through its cult. The descensus ad inferos [de-
scent to the dead] had accomplished the same thing, retroactively,
with respect to the manifest arbitrariness of the date of salvation.
These are mature products of long theological reflection, but also of
practical prudence in avoiding migrations of whole peoples to the
specially distinguished place, as to the Kaaba in Mecca, in the case of
Islam. To that extent the Crusades, viewed theologically, are anach-
ronisms. Dogmatic religion, consolidating itself-after the dying away
of the apocalyptic alarm- in the canon of its texts and its cult, has
to make its peace with the indifference of space and time. It will finally
conform to it, instead of creating new significances.
Christianity strove for unlimited transportability by means of an
increased degree of abstraction in its system of dogma, as an increased
distance from myth. There is indeed the limit concept of a world
religion that neither depends on autochthonous familiarities nor refers
back to them, but there is no concept of a world myth, not even under
the extreme assumptions of comparability in the culture-circle theory
and in structuralism. These comparisons are never more than theo-
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Chapter 3
retical analyses, which cannot successfully lay hold of the specificity

of the names and stories. Myth by its nature is not capable of an
abstract system of dogma that would leave local and temporal pe-
culiarities behind it. On the contrary, it is oriented specifically toward
these.
Through its combination with ancient philosophy, Christianity was
promoted to the sole system of dogma that, however unintelligible its
level of abstraction may be for the common people, represents the
rank of a world religion without reservation. Even if it is not, as
Nietzsche thought, ancient Platonism carried on by other means and
with a different audience, still it achieved the separation from myth
and the definition, through precise formulas, of its own rigorous claim
to truth, only by means of a metaphysics that, even through its negation,
was able to become the precondition of the idea of science and the
theoretical exactitude that has in practice, and in spite of all autoch-
thonous resistances, made the European attitude to reality the world-
\vide uniform of the intelligentsia.
Against the dogmatic mode of thought, with its claim to homo-
geneous validity in universal space and universal time-in other words,
with precisely what Platonism had invented, by virtue of its introduction
of the 'Ideas' as timeless and placeless validities, and as the imitation
of which, as far as the claim to rigorous truth is concerned, one can
regard the dogmatic mode of thought-against this mode of thought,
the characteristic differentiation of the mythical 'significances' stands
out as a structuring that is opposed to the intolerable indifference of
space and time. So demythologizingq must render the spatial and
temporal distinctions invalid, must deny the priority given to the di-
rections of above and below: It must deny the mythical element of
an ascension of the messianic figure into heaven just as much as the
assignment of the Last Judgment to the valley ofJehoshaphat. Never-
theless the Ascension, though in the New Testament it is unmistakably
a makeshift solution to the problems of contingency produced by the
Resurrection, is part of the Christian creeds. And this is not \vithout
rigorous systematic reason. The God who has become flesh cannot
return to the pure placelessness and timelessness fi'om which he came
unless the permanence and finality of his alliance with human nature
are to become just as questionable as the Old Testament covenant.
When the Ascension solves the problem of what to do with the Messiah
quite unclearly and with untheatrical embarrassn1ent, it creates a means
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Part I
of entrance into a once again indefinite, open, homogeneous temporal

dimension, which may have been stretched out already by the hope
of a long, perhaps definitive postponement of eschatology. The mythical
element serves to mark the gaining of a new and unmythical time
structure. The timelessness of dogma and the omnipresence of the
reality of God in the cult are aimed at leveling off the mythical profile.
The fact that what seems to work toward rationality nevertheless
counts as a renunciation, like the surrender of the character of the
world as a finite 'housing,' at the beginning of the modern age, is
something that can be felt as self-denial only after a long delay.
"Very deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?"
With these lines Thomas Mann begins hisjoseph tetralogy. Instead of
speaking of the indifference of time they speak, using the metaphor
of the well, of its unfathomability. That is just as much uncanniness
as it is the indifference, the equivalence of every moment with respect
to all others, just as the indifference of space is the equivalence of
every location in space with respect to all others. The Magic Mountain
had portrayed the subject of time as the cancellation of the con-
sciousness of time in the exotic situation-the ecstatic situation-of
people who are doomed to death. In the parodied myth of joseph,
time loses its unidirectionality. Between what is later and what is
earlier, un-Platonic relationships come into being, that is, relationships
not of original and replica but rather of mirror image and mirror
image, relationships characterized by an uncertain direction of ref-
erence. Even in Nietzche's formalization of eternal recurrence the ques-
tion had remained open whether the present decides only for the
future of the worlds or for their past as well; if it did not do the latter,
it would itself already be determined, as a repetition. Instead of the
new burden of the cosmic responsibility of saying "Let it be this way,"
man would bear only the oppression, which had horrified Schopen-
hauer, of "unceasingly traversing a circular path of burning coals."
We know something about the pathology of space. Such marked
modes of suffering as claustrophobia and agoraphobia present them-
selves as phenomena that can be grasped instantly. The modes of
suffering in time are otherwise; they can be grasped only with difficulty
and only over long periods. Even the morbid boredom that periodically
appears has found no pathologist of time; the mania for saving time,
together with perplexity as to what to do with it, may yet find its
discipline, if the self-appointment of the theoreticians of 'leisure' re-
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Chapter 3
mains without effect. Insecurity and lack of confidence, as affective

aspects of the unfathomability of time, are phenomena that smoulder
for long periods, conupting subcutaneously above all by constraining
people to set up dividing lines, turning points, indicators, and means
of orientation to which expectations and apprehensions are attached,
as in the fin de siecle.
To give outlines to the homogeneous flow of time, rather than letting
it have the continuity of a mere 'and-so-forth'-to synchronize it with
the self-consciousness of the successive generations and with their
exclusive claim to reality - can appear as a matter merely of decisive
dealings, of pure action, of 'not-so-forth'. That is a pattern that was
created by the modem age. As a result of the need to posit a clear
and decisive beginning for itself and to found this on resolve and
radicalism, the modem age decreed the value of everything prior to
it as nil. It sought to defend this borderline against the leveling off
and washing out produced by the accumulation of historical material,
which tends only toward transitions and always has another prior
stage and another forerunner to offer-but which also, by virtue of
its obligatory rationality, simply cannot deliver anything else but this.
In historylessness lies the opportunity of every remythicization: It
is easiest to project mythical turning points into empty space. That is
why the removal of history from school curricula is not so much a
mistake in planning or a failure of understanding as, rather, an alarming
symptom: Either mythicization is already at work or it will immediately
be induced by the loss of the historical consciousness of time. It may
be that we can learn nothing from history but the fact that we have
a history; but this already is enough to prevent us from putting ourselves
under the regime of wishes - including the wish that the suspicion
that there is a 'repetition of the same' could make it possible for us
not to will it, so that instead, in what has become the empty space
of time, other pregnant significances [Pragnanzenl (not ones that history
would ever confirm) can be displayed, and offered for imitation and
for the formation of expectations.
It is true that a sense of history is not yet a resolve to bring about
a particular future; but there is simply no other way of gaining sensitivity
to a future than through insight into the uniqueness and ilTetrievability
of \vhat is past. The fact that the future is cornposed neither of the
wax figures of the past nor of the imagines [irnagesl of utopian \vishes
is sornething that one can on]y learn fi~om the specific futures of the
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Part I
past times that already make up our past. Here, of course, nothing
happens par ordre de Mufti ['according to orders']. There is an antinomy
between what we need from history and what we find in history, an
antinomy that we cannot master, because it is only a part of the
constitutive antinomy of wishes and realities. In the wish structure of
time, beginnings and ends play the most important role. What we
need from history tends toward indicators having the clarity of mythical
models, indicators that enable the individual subject, with his finite
time, to determine how he can set himself in a relationship to the
large-scale structures that reach far beyond him. As a result of its
motivation in the life-world, historiography also works against the
indifference of time. That is why it cannot abandon the concept of
epochs, however often its right to that concept is disputed. But the
more it puts to work its technique of compacting, allocating roles,
dating, dividing up and describing conditions, the less it avoids the
suspicion of producing nominal artifacts in the service of the methodical
processing of the material. The mythical mode of thought works toward
evidentness in the articulation of time; it is able to do this because no
one ever asks for its chronology. Besides beginnings and ends it has
the free use of simultaneity and prefiguration, imitative execution and
the recurrence of the same.
The dogmatic mode of thought has to assert the irrelevance of time
for its definitions, but it cannot entirely reject manifestness in the
articulation of time. Christianity brought mythical and historical means
close to one another in this way by means of the most effective device
in the articulation of time: the fixing of an absolute temporal pole
and point of reference for chronology. It is the extreme reduced form
of a multiple articulation such as was regenerated again and again in
chiliastic speculations. The dogmatic model of time is the correlate of
the ubiquitous representation of the saving events by means of the
sacramental cult. The one event is named toward which time, in
fulfilling itself, runs, and from which it unexpectedly expands into the
interval of grace. The meting out of that interval turns out to be so
generous that it has to be measured. The result is that it can never
depart so far from its point of reference that the memory of that point
is lost in and with time.
How far the early Christian period still was from harmonizing the
need for pregnance in history with the requirement of historical def-
initeness can be observed in the gospel author's carelessness in dating
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Chapter 3
the birth of the Savior. Luke was not much concerned about the
incompatibility of the dates that were easily accessible to his contem-
poraries - on the one hand, from the census of Quirinius, and on the
other hand from the end of Herod's reign-because, by somewhat
neglecting that inconsistency, he could give a plausible explanation
for the locations of Jesus' birth and of the progTess of his childhood. 35
Much more important to him than securing the historical point in
time against chronological objections was his concern to make con-
nections with the important reference points that were authenticated
in the Old Testament. The birth in Bethlehem, in spite of the family's
being originally from Nazareth, was indispensable for Jesus' descent
from David, and the repetition of the great Old Testament movements
between the Nile and the Jordan was the most imposing way of
elevating this childhood story.
At the beginning of the fourth century the founder of the histo-
riography of the Church, Eusebius of Caesarea, has a view of the
initiating date of the story of salvation that accentates an entirely
different aspect. His view has become solicitous about state policy,
about the preservation of the world. His dating takes on a relationship
to the form of governance of the Imperium Romanum [Roman Empire].
Erik Peterson has shown the importance, for the self-understanding
of politics in the age of the caesars, of Christianity's offer to set the
unity of the new God alongside the unity of the empire and the ruler. 36
In that case, for one looking back from the time of Constantine, the
assignment of Jesus' birth to the point in time in which Judea, after
the removal of the last Herodian, Archelaus, had become a Roman
province, had to become significant. The integration of the empire
should also have taken place in the area from which salvation had
come-at the same moment that a meaning for history, as yet unknown
to the surrounding world, was coming to pass. Such establishment of
simultaneity is a favorite way of bringing about mythical significance.
When Eusebius accepts chronological difficulties with the biblical text
as the price of this simultaneity, he decides in favor of a different
mode of thought from the one that would have given anything not
to introduce more doubtful questions into the dating of Jesus' birth
than the text of Luke already raised for concerned or ITIocking
contemporanes.
The indifference of time to what occurs 'in time' forces itself upon
us in every anachronism as a source of annoyance in the relationship
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Part I
to time. The simultaneity of things that do not seem to belong together

and whose meaningful structures collide in time, as material objects
do in space, can become a challenge to bring about the synchronization
that can be produced by acceleration and retardation. But this holds
more for states than for actions, that is, it holds for realities that cannot
be sharply delimited and dated, and the chronological simultaneity
of which is often only a matter of the kind of rhetoric that encourages
or wards off.
Loss of accurate datability requires compensation in the form of
pregnance. For as soon as the search for significance operates within
the realm of documentable history, it is already a piece of our exhibition
to ourselves of the fact that history can be made. Events then require
actions. The exaggeration of the uniqueness and special quality of the
event, which is supposed to be taken as representing an aggregate of
actions, is also a way of mythicizing it. When pregnance is lost, however,
the basis for a conception of how and by whom history is made is also
lost. That is why misgivings, or at least a feeling of loss, are induced
when doubts arise about the reality or the function of Luther's nailing
up of the theses, as a datable event, or when the storming of the
Bastille becomes the side effect of changing conditions or of a causal
chain that bypasses the event.
The consolation we derive from giving precedence to conditions
over events is based only on the hypothesis that conditions are the
result of the actions of an indeterminate large number of people
instead of just a few whom we can name. But it is just as natural to
suppose that history then becomes a process in nature, a sequence of
waves, a glacial drift, a tectonic fault movement, a flood, or an alluvial
deposit. Here, too, science works against elementary needs and there-
with in a way that favors susceptibility to remythicization. The more
subtle the theoretical knowledge, the more it nourishes the suspicion
that history does not take place and is not made in its 'great' moments
and that no causality attaches to those of its scenes that are ready for
engraving, but rather the chains of their motivations have already run
out when the hammer is raised to nail up the theses, when the breaking
of windows takes place or the trumpet is blown for the day of reckoning.
Where the idea of the sole dominion of action in history is still far
from people's thoughts, it is more likely to be the natural framework
of all actions, set by birth and death, that is marked out for special
interest. Plutarch expresses his admiration for Alexander with the
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Chapter 3
note, which was hardly verifiable for him, that Alexander was born
during the same night in which Herostratus set fire to the temple of
Diana at Ephesus. That is full of meaning because it also points toward
what was impending for Asia as a result of this birth. But then Plutarch
heaps further coincidences on top of this one: the arrival on the same
day of the news of the victory, for his father Philip, of a racehorse at
Olympia, as well as that of the victory of his general Parmenio over
the Illyrians. Simultaneity with a victory in a battle or at Olympia
does not awaken acute historical doubt, but simultaneity with the
beacon fire at Ephesus already attracts critical attention. This differ-
entiation is a criterion for 'significance,' which is not something with
which we readily credit history. Characteristically, since Bayle, si-
multaneity as a means of enhancement has been regarded only from
the point of view of deceptive and deceitful tradition - as calling for
mistrust. 37 The simultaneity that connects the decisive private date
with the 'great' public event has found refuge in the unverifiable realm
of the literature of memoirs; while, if it is heaped up, it does make
the recollection suspect, at the same time it satisfies the desire that
reality should still contain signs drawing attention to important things.
In the field of asserted simultaneities, those of great historical events
with spectacular cosmic phenomena stand out. The most prominent
instance is the appearance of the star at Jesus' birth, and the eclipse
at his death. The possibility of retrospectively checking this old in-
strument for the production of significance has fallen into the laps of
historians as a by-product of later scientific exactitude in the calculation
of solar eclipses and of the paths of comets. Tradition had dated the
founding of Rome at April 21, 753 B.C., and equipped the day with
the cosmic distinction of a solar eclipse. To be sure, the coincidence
required only a small displacement, once one had to recognize that
the nearest solar eclipse happened only three years later, on April 24,
750 B.C. Still, can one call this a 'mystical dilettantism,' as Bayle would
still have judged it, giving the victory to the Enlightenment? It is lTIOre
nearly another form, besides human action, of enhancing the event:
The founding of the city could not have been subject to the arbitrary
decision of those involved, if the universe had cooperated in it so
publicly.
When Luke writes in his Gospel that the solar eclipse at Jesus' death
extended over the entire earth, this exaggeration was already rec-
ognized by Origen and excused as a corruption of the text. But the
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Part I
evangelist shares this kind of exaggeration' with other ancient authors,

who not only raised partial eclipses to total ones, so as to distinguish
an event, but also moved eclipses that didn't occur at all, or that could
only be observed elsewhere, to the place of the event, as well as moving
the dates together appropriately. As A. Demandt has shown, the ancient
reports can be classified according to their deformations, with the help
of the concept of the "tendency toward pregnance" [Pragnanztendenzl
that was produced by Gestalt psychology. The result is a piece of
historical phenomenology. There are three directions in which alter-
ations can be seen to have been made: quantitative increases in what
is stated to have occurred; changes in the type of event, where the
phenomena weren't fully defined; and synchronization of what were
temporally distant events. All that remains open to question is whether
the function of enhancing pregnance is not underestimated when all
that the modification of the facts is supposed to have accomplished
is to have made "the historical picture more impressive, clearer and
more easily comprehensible. "38
When Thucydides writes that during the Peloponnesian War solar
eclipses occurred more often than in the past, the result is that the
event is thrown into relief against everything that went before it.
Cosmic phenomena also mark 'smaller' world downfalls when they
accompany events with which irretrievable material has passed away,
as with the darkening of the sun at the death of Caesar. The language
used for "darkening" in Mark and Matthew-in contrast to the specific
statement in Luke-in connection with the phenomena atJesus' death
leaves open the possibility of an atmospheric cloudiness being intensified
into an astronomical eclipse - an elevation that might satisfy the ex-
pectation of a conformity between the cosmos and man's need for
salvation, and the augury of the apocalyptic events that were thought
to be near.
The darkening at the death of Caesar, which as a longer-lasting
atmospheric impediment to the shining of the sun could explain the
failure of the crops to ripen that was noticed, was connected by Virgil
with the fear of eternal night-that is, it was related eschatologically
to one of man's elementary uncertainties. Only later commentators
then did not hesitate to deduce from the dimness of the light a darkening
of the heavenly body, which would in any case still have been permitted
to the poet as a metaphor. The most extreme exaggeration of what
happened at the death of Jesus is accomplished for the first time by
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Chapter 3
Tertullian, who is not only rhetorically zealous, as a jurist, but also

expresses his affinity for the end of the world when he imposes the
title of casus mundi [world disaster, end of the world]. At the same
time anyone could know already, or be aware of as the objection that
Origen had brought against Luke's account (and for which a deep
knowledge of astronomy was hardly necessary), that at the date of
Jesus' Passion, during Passover, there had to have been a full moon,
so that a solar eclipse was out of the question.
The superelevation of historical events by means of simultaneous
cosmic spectacles has something to do with the expectation or sug-
gestion that history was made, if not by man, then at least for man.
That could still more easily be expected of it if man appeared, not
as the subject of the great and fateful events but rather as a cooperating
figure in a broader context. That is why the accent of the supposed
cosmic corroborations or warnings falls chiefly on birth and death as
the 'natural' portion of history, the pre-given scope of which is, as it
were, merely filled up by actions. So oracles and augurs had to be
consulted. Even astrology contains more than the fatalistic finding of
inescapable determinism, namely, an element of cosmic participation
in human fates, a defense against the indifference of time. That defense
lies already in the fact that astrology made increased demands on
dating and chronology. Its limit accomplishment is contained in the
attempt to cast the horoscope of the world as a whole by reference
to the calculated date of its creation.
Girolamo Cardano introduces his biography with his own horoscope,
but without thereby leveling off the historiography of his own life as
that of an experience that was still to be had. Goethe parodies this
opening with the beginning of Dichtung und Wahrheit.' Precisely in a
case in which the astrological prognosis is not taken as complete, a
combination of heavenly bodies that is interpreted, perhaps not without
irony, by its means can receive a 'significance' that is rendered strange,
as though it were taken literally, by the calculation. Goethe makes
the clumsy midwife who is involved in his birth struggle in vain against
the goodwill of the stars; in vain because "my horoscope was propitious:
the sun stood in the sign of the Virgin, and had culminated for the
day; Jupiter and Venus looked at him with a friendly eye, and Mercury
not adversely; while Saturn and Mars kept themselves indifferent; the
Inoon alone, just full, exerted the power of her reflection all the more,
as she had then reached her planetary hour. "s This is no piece of
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Part I
cosmic determinism, but more nearly the demonstration of a friendly

consent, on nature's part, to an existence that nature itself was not
able to bring about by force. It is not that the stars determine the life
that takes up poetry and truth [Dichtung und Wahrheit], because it
happened to begin under such a combination, but rather that a con-
vergence exists, which lays claim to meaning, between the astrological
pattern and the beginning of the life, a convergence that becomes
evident in the minor detail that even the unfortunate midwife was
unable to cause the event to miss the auspicious hour, which, after
all, was alone supposed to favor everything that followed. The life is
already significant in its first moment.
The astrological quotation is an element that is directed against the
leveling off that is produced by science. Since the atomism ofEpicurus,
to make natural phenomena not only indifferent to man but a matter
of indifference for him, by reducing them to the homogeneous level
of his purely theoretical interest, had been the essence of a philosophy
that freed the spirit from fear and hope and was consequently the
only means of enlightenment. If the falling and the vortexes of the
atoms, alone, had produced all the phenomena in the world, and man
as well, then there was no longer anything in nature that man could
relate to himself as a sign or a portentous intensification of his own
history. After such enlightenments it is pure anachronism when our
heroes still have attendant meteorological phenomena: the thunder-
storm that is vouched for as having occurred at the hour of Napoleon's
death on Saint Helena, or the one-uncommon for the end of March,
but similarly attested-at Beethoven's death. To people at the time,
the world seems for a moment, contrary to all science, to take notice
of man, at least in his most outstanding specimens.
The leveling down of significance by the Enlightenment - and with
it already the provocation of Romanticism to oppose that-found what
may be its finest illustration in the young Fontenelle's Histoire des Oracles
[Story of the oracles] of 1686. This brilliant polemic makes the object
of its historiographical enlightenment, modeled on Bayle, no less im-
pressively evident than it does the Enlightener's scrupulous care to
seek the principal target of his destruction indirectly. That the pagan
oracles fell silent at the moment of Jesus' birth is just as much a myth
of simultaneity as the tale of the death of the shepherds' god Pan at
the moment of Jesus' Crucifixion; the only difference. is that the end
of the oracles is a public state of affairs that is fixed to an institution.
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Chapter 3
After all the concentrated erudition he expends on the story of the

oracles' falling silent, Fontenelle has none left over to investigate the
need for such significance. He considers the one disposed of along
with the other and restricts himself to declaring his nonamazement
at the impressiveness of the myth. In Gottsched's translation: "Dieser
Gedanke fliesst so ungemein artig, dass es mich gar nicht Wunder
nimmt, dass er so gemein ge\vorden" [This idea is so uncommonly
pleasing that I don't wonder that it became so popular].39 As secretary
of the Paris Academy he himself was to be untiring in seeking out
striking theoretical accomplishments of the epoch, as in the case of
the refutation of the origin of thunderbolts. In the pamphlet on the
oracles he concentrates entirely on refuting a demonstration used by
apologetics, according to which competition between two epoch-making
agencies of revelation was supposed to have been terminated by the
admission of defeat by one of them-by falling silent-even before
it had begun. But the successful Enlightener nevertheless seems not
to be entirely insensitive to the fact that the legend of the oracles'
falling silent had offered people's minds something that, after its de-
struction by science, would not be easy to replace.
After people had been enlightened by science, by the establishment
of lawfulness in place of signs, the kind of simultaneity that was still
possible was the coincidence of events of different types, of personal
with world historical, of intellectual with political, of speculative with
coarse realistic dates. It is the Romantic return of simultaneity, without
the cosmos and only on the level of people conducting their history,
when Hegel completes the Phenomenology of the Spirit during the night
before the battle ofJ ena and already under the thunder of its cannons.
His century was not motivated to criticize this coincidence from the
point of view of historiography. Only when the connection of the
principal work of German Idealism with Napoleon's victory had become
troublesome for the thinker's reputation and for his national reliability
was the discernment found that was able to dissolve it again.
In a note to his preface to his edition of the text based on the first
edition, Johannes Hoffmeister turns against all those "who still again
and again assert with the air of knowledgeable people that the German
Idealists \vere, as it were, a corps of unpatriotic, politically indifferent
stay-at-homes who did not allow the greatest historical events to tear
their noses froln their books or their pens from their hands.' The 'I
Hegel, then, who was supposed to have both comprehended and put
his seal upon the great hour of the 'world soul on horseback' by
completing his principal work was now abjured by science. The picture
of the contemptible stay-at-home who had not hastened to the flag
so as still to tum the fortunes of battle, if not by his arm then at least
by the force of his speech, was not-it is true-retouched, but rather
taken down. The myth of simultaneity is replaced by that of a patriotic
involvement that was at least not neglected, that was in any case not
supplanted by something supposedly greater. What Hegel really was
doing at the time, however, the learned editor is not able to establish
either. The correction is itself a source of insight not for our knowldege
of Hegel but in relation to the moment in which it seemed necessary
to renounce what had previously been significant. Even to a Robert
Musil, Hoffmeister's correction of the myth can appear as a vindication
of Hegel-against a reproach, however, that only became explicit
through people's considering it necessary to refute it. 40
Significance can exceed what is aesthetically permissible. The Dane
Oehlenschlager was a nonparticipant observer at the battle of Jena.
He tends toward ironical distance and he knows that he can also
presuppose this as Goethe's private attitude. He writes to Goethe on
September 4, 1808, from Tiibingen, about the plan of a novel and
his fear that the result would unintentionally be a description of his
own life; and one would not be permitted to make that even as good
as it was in reality. There is no feeling, he says, more peculiar than
the feeling that one must place what occurs in real life above poetry,
even though the role of poetry is to represent "the ideal concentrated
beauty and meaningful content of life." This particular feeling had
never been stronger for him "than when I read Smollett's Peregrine
Pickle in Weimar while the French were winning the battle at Jena
and capturing the town. "41 It is the problem of aesthetic probability:
Fiction cannot allow itself the significance that reality produces without
losing credibility.
In spite of its derivation from Romanticism, historicism further dis-
mantled history's profile of significance, if only by the increasingly
fine-meshed screen that it applied in analyzing 'events' and 'actions.'
The more subtle historical comprehension becomes, the less serviceable
and the less potent is the attribution of simultaneity. Again, the point
is to realize the loss that is involved, as well, in order to understand
the weariness vvith "passatism"lI that arises toward the end of the
nineteenth century. This is an indication of how difficult it is to get
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Chapter 3
by without marked means of orientation in the indifference of time

and how quickly the sober understatedness of the advice that history
is what becomes of "dealings" when one views what has happened
retrospectively "in a certain way"42 is worn out. Or when one sees
those "dealings" themselves, which one day will make up history,
from too close up, too intimately, reducing them to the level of a
Sunday excursion-on the plane of, for example, the famous postcard
that Rathenau wrote to his mother from Genoa on April 19, 1922:
"Today, Easter Sunday, I made an excursion to Rapallo. Details in
the newspaper. ... Affectionately, w. "43
Significance as a defense against indifference, especially indifference
in space and time, becomes a resistance to the tendency toward con-
ditions of higher probability, of diffusion, of erosion, of entropy. To
that extent one can understand why "significance" gains a role in the
philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophiel. v It portrays life as the self-assertion
of a reality that resists probability. As such it does not relate to the
distinction between theoretical and practical needs; in fact it lets one
avoid deciding between a theoretical attitude and a practical one-a
distinction that tends in any case mainly to be between 'theory of
theory' and 'theory of practice.' But what could be acquired from this
category from the philosophy of life is a greater degree of definiteness
in regard to what it excludes and wards off.
That remains the case when Heidegger takes over the term significance
from the philosophy of life. What he designates with it is the result
of the device of tracing a differentiated way in which the world is
given for Dasein back to an elementary and unified way. "Significance"
[Bedeutsamkeitl then becomes the quality of the world for the Dasein
that is in it, as the functional specifications of which "significations"
[Bedeutungenl first become possible. To have something signify sorne-
thing to someone, but also to have Dasein signify something to itself,
presupposes a 'significance' that supports the relational totality of
signifYing. It is "what makes up the structure of the world- the structure
of that wherein Dasein as such already is. "44 The terms familiarity (with
the world) and significance (of the world for Dasein) correspond to one
another and assist in the suppression of the separation of subject and
object (a separation that has supposedly been left behind) by the unity
of Being-in-the-world. It is the unannounced return of Bergson's pre-
epistemological donnees immediates [immediate 'givens'] of 1889, the
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Part I
fulfillment by a coup de main of the expectations aroused by the

philosophy of life.
This does not exhaust the foundational relationships that Heidegger's
"fundamental ontology" offers as orientation for efforts to gain access
to the 'work of myth. 'w The intertwining of significance and familiarity
is a foreground appearance and disguises something that one is not
supposed to become aware of in its subjective-objective ambivalence:
the way they correspond to nullity [Nichtigkeit] and the production of
anxiety [A:ngstigung]. If significance is the quality of the world as it
would not originally have been for men, then it is wrung from a
situation that produced anxiety, the forcing of which into concealment
is brought about and confirmed by that very significance. Significance
is the form in which the background of nothing [des Nichts], as that
which produces anxiety, has been put at a distance, whereby, without
this 'prehistory,' the function of what is significant remains uncom-
prehended, though present. For the need for significance is rooted in
the fact that we are conscious of never being definitively exempted
from the production of anxiety. Care, as the "Being of Dasein," which
is supposed to be disclosed especially in the basic state of mind of
anxiety, is the source not only of the totality of the structure of Dasein
but also of its wanting significance in the world, in its experience, in
history. The 'naked truth' is not what life can live with; for, let us not
forget, this life is the result of a long history of complete congruence
between [man's] environment and 'signification'-congruence that is
only shattered in its most recent phase. In this history life itself con-
tinually deprives itself of an immediate relation to its abysses, to what
would make it impossible, and thus refuses to obey the 'summons of
its ten-ifying "authenticity."
This would be an example, taking advantage of movable descriptive
scenery from the stock belonging to the philosophy that follows the
philosophy of life, of the attempt to arrive at a phenomenology of
significance as an 'apotropaic' [averting] quality with respect to the
stupefaction that is delivered over to the 'absolutism of reality.' Even
if great historiographical errors may have resulted from yielding to
significances, nevertheless we are continually getting further away
from the all-inclusive suspicion, promoted by a negative analysis of
myth, that it was misunderstandings of significations - especially met-
aphors that were taken literally-that helped myth's great self-
deception to get under way in the age in which, according to Auguste
1 11
Chapter 3
Comte's classification of stages, it was dominant. Only an assessment

of the risk involved in the human mode of existence makes it possible
to discuss and to evaluate functionally the behavior that was serviceable
in mastering it, and to take seriously the tentative inclination to be
able to avail ourselves of such serviceability again.
Translator's Notes
a. Anschauung is "intuition" in the old sense of knowledge attained by visual or quasi-visual

contemplation of the object, as opposed to the indirect relation to reality that is mediated by
hypotheses. Physics and hypotheses here are the terms used by Schlegel.
b. See translator's note h to chapter 1, above.
c. From Latin sanctio, from sancire, to make sacred or to consecrate (cf "sanctity"); to ordain,
decree; to enact penalties against.
d. The debtor's oath that he has revealed all his assets.
e. This sentence is a translation, not of the original text, but of a revision that the author
intends to insert at this point in future printings.
f "Satz der Bedeutsamkeit." See his Zur Genealogie des menschlichen Bewusstseins (Bonn: Bouvier,
1966), p. 44.
g. "Ein subjectiv enteignetes theoretisches Interesse." In translating Heideggerian terms like

Bewandtnis "involvement" or vorhanden "present at hand," I have followed Macquarrie and
Robinson's translation of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
The scare quotes are mine, to set off terms that might not otherwise be recognized as 'technical.'
h. " ... gepragte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt"-the well-known final line of the first part
of the poem "Urworte: Orphisch" (1818). The last two lines, in Walter Kaufmann's translation
(Twenty German Poets [New York: Random House, 1962], p. 37), are: "No lapse of time nor any
force dissolves / a form, once stamped, that through its life evolves".
i. Pr(ignanz. The author clearly intends us to connect Pragrzanz. with the verb pr(igen (to stamp
or imprint)-which gives us Goethe's "gepragte Fonn"-rather than understanding it as meaning
"pregnancy" in the sense of being with child (or, metaphorically, "laden with meaning"). I
have nevertheless followed translators of literature in Gestalt psychology, and Ralph Manheim's
translation of volume 3 of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1957), pp. 191 fr., in rendering it as pregnance (even though that obsolete form
in fact refelTed to the usual kind of "pregnancy"), because (a) the author's usage is certainly
closely related to those in Gestalt psychology and in Cassirer; (b) we do have an archaic sense
of pregnant, meaning "pressing," "compelling," "cogent," or "clear" (O.E.D.), which derives
from Latin premere rather than praegnans and which could presumably have been tun1Cd into
a substantive as pregnmlce; and, finally, (c) the only available alternative rendering of Pragnanz.,
"precision," does not have the connotation of stamping or imprinting at all. The obsolete
form pregnance, pIllS occasional use of scare quotes, should remind the reader that this is a
somewhat unusual usage.
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Part I
j. Cagliostro was a highly successful forttme-teller and medium who had initiated many prominent
people in Germany and France into his "Egyptian" Masonic lodge. He was an accomplice, in
the "necklace affair," of the Countess de la Motte, who duped Cardinal Louis de Rohan into
thinking that he could regain Marie-Antoinette's favor by acquiring a famous diamond necklace
for her. When the intrigue was exposed, the trial caused a great scandal and the monarchy's
reputation suffered (even though Marie-Antoinette was in fact quite innocent in the case)
because a cardinal had thought that he could, in effect, bribe her.
k. See Joyce's letter to Nora, August 7, 1909, in Letters of james joyce, vol. 2, ed. R. Ellmann
{London: Faber & Faber, 1966}, p. 232.
I. The protagonist of Der urbrochene Krug.
m. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 22, p. 133.
n. See translator's note g to part 1, chapter 1.
o. Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 329 {p. 283 of German editions}.
p. Fehlleistungen "faulty functions," as translated in Freud's Complete Psychological Works, vol. 6:

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life·
q. Entmythisierung, the effort to free Christianity from mythical 'accretions.' The concept was
made especially prominent, in Germany, by the work of Rudolf Bultmann {who usually employs
the longer form, Entmythologisierung}.
r. "Poetry and truth," Goethe's autobiography.
s. Truth and Fiction: Relating to My Life, trans. J. Oxenford (Boston, 1883; rptd. New York:
Horizon Press, 1969), vol. 1, p. 9.
t. G. W. F. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes, ed. J. Hoffmeister (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1937), p. XXXVI,
n. 1. {This footnote is omitted from the 1954 reprint of this edition.}
u. Passatism us , coined from the Italian tempi passati {"past ages"}, was a term of abuse that was
applied to Romanticism's enthusiasm for history by various nineteenth-century writers who
prided themselves on their concern for the present or the future, or both. It thus prepared
the way for the 'antihistoricism' of existentialists, logical positivists, neo-Thomists, et al.
{Information supplied by the author.}
v. Lebensphilosophie is represented in Germany above all by Wilhelm Dilthey, who gave the
term Bedeutsamkeit {'significance'} the special sense in which it is used here.
w. The author distinguishes between the "work of myth" [Arbeit des Mythos] and the "work on
myth" [Arbeit am Mythos] that is referred to in his title. {See paragraph 13 of part 1, chapter 4,
which contains the book's first reference to Lucretius [see the index], and paragraph 7 of part 2,
chapter 4 [see Fichte in the index].} The former refers to the essential and original function and
accomplishment of myth as such; the latter to the ongoing reworking of inherited mythical
materials, which is the only form and the only way in which we know myth.
4
Procedural Regulations
The river delegates its fear of the sea to many arms.

- Helmut Lamprecht, Delta
To project myth onto the schema of progress would be an ill-considered

way of providing it with contemporaneity. It has its own procedure
by which to exhibit a directed process, by telling of the gaining of
space, and the change of forms in the direction of human ones between
the night and chaos of the beginning and a present state that is left
undefined. In one sentence: The world ceases to contain as many
monsters. In a sense that initially is not ethical at all, but more nearly
physiognomic, the world becomes 'friendlier.' It approaches what the
man who listens to myth needs: to be at home in the world.
It is true that the generations of the gods supplant one another, in
dominion over the world, by means of deception, cunning, and cruelty,
but as power becomes consolidated, its exercise becomes more bear-
able. Here the question of what this process may 'reflect' in the history
of religion is immaterial. The fearsome generations before Zeus could
have been simply invented or combined in the myth in order to bring
into relief, against that background, the mildness and friendliness to
the world of the last member of the dynastic sequence. Or, equally,
phases that have already been lived through in dealing with the powers
and the gods could be reflected in the mythical genealogy. What is
decisive for the function of myth is that something that one could call
the 'quality' of the divine is represented as not originally being given,
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Part I
from the beginning or from eternity. What is made sure of for con-
sciousness is something that it is supposed to know that it has behind
it once and for all. That could be the meaning of every story; but
only myth can afford to subject the facts, which may in any case be
lost, to the demand for 'significance.'
The young Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, inspired to philological combat
by Nietzsche's Birth rifTragedy, denied that the Titans who were over-
thrown by Zeus in the myth of the Olympians had ever ruled the
consciousness of the Hellenes, in an age "where the dark forces of
nature are in charge, before the appearance of their conquerors, the
forces of nature that are friendly to man." Such an age, he says,
"which satisfied their religious needs only with the former" [the "dark
forces"], never existed; and so neither did "a revolution of faith that
banished the first and symbolized their downfall in its own faith by
a change of sovereign in heaven. " I That is directed against Nietzsche's
mythical realism, which interprets the stratifications that can still be
apprehended in the epics and the tragedies as marking out antithetical
concepts of existence. In order to defend an original purity of the
Hellenic spirit as a form of belief, Wilamowitz denies that myth has
this kind of value, as a document that reflects what happened. His
scorn is directed at any idea of a laborious removal of monsters, whose
distance could be exhibited and made secure in myth. Genuine serenity
simply excludes original darkness. Homer stands for the early morning
of the Hellenic faith rather than for a position, already that of an
onlooker, on this side of the seriousness of myth. In the classicist-
philologian's view of the Hellenes, their natural gift for greatness and
for serenity may of course decline in the end and dissolve into lower
forms that are distasteful and consequently uninteresting to the dis-
cipline, but none of this reaches back to the 'origins.' We will have
to return to this in connection with Nietzsche's account of myth.
Even Olympian Zeus still has traits of ill will toward man, of scorn
for those who are not his creatures, whom he had to take over, from
the Titans, into his cosmos, and whom he considers inadequate in-
habitants for his world. But each of his attempts to make them disappear
from his nature fails and each failure is combined with the exhaustion
of his measures against them. This gives Prometheus his unforgettable
position in mythical anthropogenesis. He is the only one of the Titans
who, as Zeus's former ally in the battle for power, is still prominent
in Zeus's epoch and can prevent him from destroying the Titans'
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Chapter 4
creatures. His myth demonstrates the possibility of restricting Zeus's

power over men, when he challenges Zeus and survives Zeus's pun-
ishment. That is why the Prometheus who is hacked at on the Caucasus,
who knows the secret of Zeus's vulnerability, is the outstanding fig-
uration of the mythical division of powers.
What is left of Zeus's disfavor toward men is his inventiveness in
entangling them in deadly conflicts among themselves. Even Hesiod
allows this to show through: "Now all the gods were divided through
strife; for at that very time Zeus who thunders on high was meditating
marvellous works - to mix confusions over the boundless earth - and
already he was hastening very much to diminish the race of mortal
men .... "2 Helen, who will cause such deadly complications, is the
daughter of Zeus with Leda-almost a counterpart to Pandora in the
Prometheus myth. It is the oath that Helen's suitors swear among
themselves to guarantee the successful wooer's possession of her that
finally leads to the expedition of the allies to Troy. If one follows
Herodotus's view of the story, it was the beginning of the long, many-
acted confrontation between Europe and Asia. It is the "great event"
that Zeus devised for men.
There is also a difference between Prometheus and the demigod
Hercules, who is clearly a bringer of salvation, not that he purifies
men but that he purifies the world for them, like the Augean stables.
Even in the New Testament the question has still not been left behind
as to whether salvation comes through the removal of Satan's power
or through the removal of men's guilt. The mythical formulation is
the myth, one sentence long, in Luke [10: 18]: "I beheld Satan as
lightning fall from heaven." Myth's mode of functioning is to certify
that the decision occurs at a remote place or time, in a theatrical
rather than a moral form.
Wilamowitz believed in the faith [or "belief': Glaube] of the Hellenes. a
Where there were no traces of a cult, there was no faith. The personnel
extending from chaos or Nyx [Night] to the Titans drops out of myth;
it does not fit in a world of faith. But Horner makes Zeus himself fear
Night, the "subduer of gods and men," and shrink fi-om displeasing
her. For it was she who had begun the deceitful and gruesolne process
of generational change in the rulership of the gods when she pressed
into the hand of her son Cronus the moon-sickle with \vhich to castrate
Uranus when he came to their nightly bed and thus to put an end to
the begetting of monsters. Lovely Aphrodite arises from the bloody
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Part I
semen-foam of the castrated god as a confirmation of the extinction

of the monstrous power of begetting giants, Cyclopes, Hundred-handed
Ones, and other deformities.
If one makes 'faith,' with any similarity at all to the post-Christian
conception, into the criterion, then this is all sheer fairy tale, not the
fanciful representation of processes of overcoming, of getting and
having something behind one. Nor will we be allowed to make com-
parisons with late abstractions like Phobus and Deimus [literally, Flight
and Terrod, the sons of Ares and Aphrodite in Hesiod, whom Homer
puts on Agamemnon's shield in an allegorical configuration as drivers
of Ares's chariot. The name "Phobus" for the snake on Zeus's aegis
could be archaic, even if it is not the demon Phobus. 3 For the finding
of names, for demons too, is a process that reproduces itself the more
names have already been found.
One who looks Medusa in the face must die. The most extreme
intensification of the terrifying quality of a being is when its mere
face drives out life. All other dangers are founded on more than optical
encounter. A modem anthropologist, having in mind the 'vagus death,'
formulated this in the proposition " ... when a subject dies in a situation
from which there is no way out, then its death is caused by meaning."4
Each of the details collected by Apollodorus makes Medusa more
harmless: Instead of hair she had snakes, her tongue hung out between
an enormous set of teeth, she had hands made of iron and wings of
gold as well as a head covered with dragon scales. She is one of the
Gorgons, whose derivation, like that of most of the figures of terror,
points to primeval times, to the transitional area between the formless
and the formed, between Chaos and Eros. Among Freud's literary
remains, from as early as 1922, there was also an explanation of the
experience underlying the Medusa story as that of being paralyzed
by a mere look. The myth puts the Gorgon in the neighborhood of
Poseidon, like so much that emerges from the depths of the sea, where
what is formless or beyond form is at home. It is a later coordination
with the Olympian system when Medusa's ugliness is described as the
punishment administered by Athena when she discovers Poseidon
lying with Medusa in her temple. From this combination arises-at
the moment of Medusa's decapitation by Perseus-the winged horse
Pegasus, who was later to be the steed of poets. A monster like Medusa
could only be overcome by means of cunning. Cunning must be seen,
against the background of coarse cruelty, as alread y a step in the
refinement of means. This still holds for Odysseus, the one who is
full of tricks, when he has to deal with monsters like the descendant
of Poseidon, Polyphemus.
Myth represents a world of stories that localizes the hearer's stand-
point in time in such a way that the fund of the monstrous and the
unbearable recedes in relation to him. This includes the transitional
forms between beast and man, even though philological protest has
been entered against seeing the Olympian world of anthropomorphic
gods as a late form of early animal forms that still sometimes show
through - animal forms such as are characteristic of Egypt, where
Anubis has human form but still has a dog's head. Mixed forms of
this kind are distributed worldwide in cult and myth. 5 Cassirer's ob-
servation is certainly accurate, that only Greek sculpture put a sharp
end to theriomorphy, and did this less by doing away with masked
and mixed forms than by "helping man to find his own image,"6 by
suggesting to self-consciousness, through what it saw, the 'roundabout'
path via the god. In any case the personnel of the Classical Vvalpurgis
Night, b in many combinations of snake and horse, ass and swan, lion
and dragon, with parts of the human body, presses toward an exclusive
and finally an exalted human form.
Both phenomena, that of the elimination of monsters from the
world and that of the transitional forms on the way to the human
eidos [form, figure], must have to do with myth's function of producing
distance from the quality of uncanniness. The mental schema of distance
still rules the Greeks' concept of theory as the position and attitude
of the untroubled observer. In its purest embodiment, in the attitude
of the spectator of Greek tragedy, this schema paves the way for the
conceptual history of "theory." In one of the most influential treatises
of the century of German philology, Jacob Bemays reconstructed Ar-
istotle's theory of the functioning of tragedy as catharsis through fear
and pity as a unique metaphor drawn from medical purging practices,
which leads the spectator in the theater, precisely by means of his
passage through the terrors on the stage, to release from the passions
that entangle one in tragedy. 7 "Relief, together with enjoyment" is
the formula that Aristotle coined for music, one that for the first tilTIe
describes aesthetic enjoyment as the gaining of distance. Since-in a
way that seems intolerable - the mimesis, or representation, is COITI-
posed 'merely' of experience, it is in a 'homeopathic' dosage that,
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Part I
while it does treat like with like, removes it from the locus of its excess
and permits the peace of mind of having it behind one.
Bernays noted correctly how foreign to Aristotle is the character-
ization of the theater as a moral institution, because he just does not
carry the principle of the equality of cause and effect over to the
spectator, as Plato had done with his critique of music and of aesthetic
mimesis - with what was then the unavoidable consequence of ex-
cluding them from his state. With regard to the metaphor of purging
"relief," Bernays has to warn the contemporary reader expressly not
to decide to "tum up his nose in hasty prudishness."
The same advice applies in a different way to Lucretius's much
reviled simile in the proem to the second book of his didactic poem,
where he represents the philosopher contemplating the world of atom-
istic accident as a man standing on a solid rock who, out of danger,
watches a shipwreck at sea - not, indeed, enjoying the destruction of
the others, but nevertheless enjoying his distance from it. 8 But he does
this only because he is not a god, although he is aware that the only
way to be happy is to be like the gods in the intermundia [spaces
between the worlds]. They do not need to apply discipline against fear
and hope because they never learn anything of what we glimpse,
metaphorically, in the shipwreck. For the philosopher, physics has
taken over the distancing function of myth: It neutralizes everything,
without exception. But above all it lets us comprehend, for the first
time, what had be~n at issue - with the inadequate means of myth,
too-all along. Only work on myth-even if it is the work of finally
reducing it- makes the work of myth manifest.
Even though I distinguish, in discussing connections that are evident
in literature, between myth and its reception, I do not want to leave
room for the assumption that 'myth' is the primary, archaic formation,
in relation to which everything subsequent can be called reception.
Even the earliest items of myth that are accessible to us are already
products of work on myth. In part, this preliterary phase of work has
passed into the compound of myths, so that the process of reception
has itself become a presentation of its manner of functioning.
Alongside the monsters from the depths of the sea and the earth,
in Hesiod's Theogony, Poseidon himself is a figure of uncanniness and
of doubtful goodwill, of dangerous irritability. If his power explicitly
goes back to an act of division of powers between the sons of Cronus,
in which Zeus acquired the heavens, Hades the underworld, and Po-
seidon the sea, then the listener realizes with a shiver what any of
them, but especially this one, could have done with men if he had
been alone and without any countervailing power. Poseidon is perhaps
called earthshaker because the earth was thought of as floating on
the sea. Earthquakes have always been men's most extreme experiences
of insecurity. This background makes significant for the first time the
fact that the altar on Helicon, which had originally been consecrated
to Poseidon, was rededicated to the worship of Zeus. Thus this becomes
a piece of secured preference for the cosmos: The earthshaker had
to yield to the thunderer. The terrors of the latter are indeed more
theatrical, but less uncanny, less unsettling to our consciousness of the
world.
The stories of those who returned from the siege and destruction
of Troy are largely composed of reports of misdeeds committed by
Poseidon through storms and shipwrecks, shipwrecks that are do-
mesticated by the role they play in the stories of the founding of cities
around the entire perimeter of the Aegean. It is also a form of the
separation of powers that though the god can still violently shake the
life that goes on on terra firma, he can no longer break it. He can
delay Odysseus's return home, but cannot prevent it; that return is
the successful assertion of the world's familiarity, in opposition to the
embodiment of its uncanniness. As a receiver of human sacrifices,
Poseidon belongs to the stratum of those who have been overcome.
This fact is represented by the myth of Idomeneus, who during his
return home from Troy believes that he can only escape the storm
by vowing to sacrifice the first person he encounters to the sea god,
and then is only prevented by a higher intervention from offering up
his own son. Such myths, like the prevention of Abraham's obedience,
are monuments of the final leaving behind of archaic rituals, a leaving
behind such as Freud saw in the alliance of the sons against patricide.
One sees from this how questionable it is to speak of a "humanization
of myth," since after all myth itself testifies to the intolerability of
what becomes obsolete in it. Humanization as myth- that, too, is a
valid principle.
When Hesiod calls Zeus "the greatest in strength," it is not only
favor-seeking and rhapsodic glorification but also a concentration of
the need for security on the figure who represents the strengthening
of trust in the world and who has been pushed forward by the mythical
process. The rededication of the altar on Helicon is a mythical signal
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Part I
of the same sort as the liberation of Prometheus by Hercules, which

Hesiod has not heard of because it expresses the contingency even
of Zeus's dominion.
The fact that Poseidon has not finally relinquished terra firma is
revealed by tidal waves. But even less than they accomplish is accom-
plished by his throwing his trident onto the Acropolis of Athens, by
which he wants to take possession of the territory of Attica. This yields
nothing but the spring of seawater. A contrast to this is presented by
the other method of annexing land that is demonstrated by Athena,
who plants the first olive tree next to the spring. Zeus prevents the
two from fighting and hands the conflict over to a court of arbitration,
which decides by a majority of one vote in favor of Athena's claim
because her olive tree will be the more important gift of agriculture.
This myth stands in the background when it is reported, in connection
with Xerxes' conquest of Athens, that after the temple of Erechtheus
on the Acropolis was burned down, the olive tree next to the sea-
water spring sent up a sprout from its stump as soon as the second
day after the conflagration. 9 The polis is founded on the taming of
foreign might. Zeus did not exercise power himself, but regulated the
procedure that was decisive for the reliability of the ground on which
life and history take place.
The consolidation of the state that the world has arrived at, as a
'cosmos,' and the restriction of every absolutism that arises in this
process are interwoven as antithetical motives in myth. Without setting
Prometheus free, Zeus would have lost his power; after the concession
of setting him free, he will never be able to exercise it to the utmost
extent of his will. He had not been able to conquer without assistance
either the Titans or the giants whose bodies were partly snakes; and
every assistance means a sort of constitutionalization of power.
In the Iliad, Achilles tells a story that he knows from the mouth of
his mother, Thetis, of the revolt that Hera, Athena, and Poseidon
carried out against Zeus and that Zeus only puts down because Thetis
makes the arrogant giant Briareus take up a position next to him.
Zeus can no longer do to the rebels what he had done to the Titans
and the giants, to Typhon or to Prometheus. His power must be great
enough to prevent monsters and rebels against the world order from
arising, but it may not be so great as to secure the realization of his
every wish.
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Both Homer and Hesiod are opposed to any magical attitude toward
gods, and they can be so because myth is not anthropocentric. It
involves man only marginally in the story of the gods. Man is a
beneficiary of this story, because he is aided by the change in conditions
that it involves; but he is not its subject. In this respect, too, Epicurus's
gods are the ultimate logical result: They don't even know of man's
eXIstence.
I regard the proposition that the dynastic generational succession
of the gods is to be ascribed to Oriental influence as a free, but
characteristic conjecture of philology, as a discipline that simply does
not believe it can exist without something in the nature of 'influences.'
One should try, just once, to imagine what stories could have been
told about the gods without such succession. Their division into two
sexes and the web of relationships based on that are firm preconditions
for stories getting under way at all. But then it is already natural that
there should be generations just as much as there are ambitions and
rivalries. I cannot see that special 'influences' would have been necessary
in order to introduce something of that sort. The term influence suggests
that it is a matter of an addition to a system that in other respects
was original and self-supporting. But this system would not be rec-
ognizable if it did not exhibit, with the logic that is built into the
premises of plurality and sexuality, the lessening of man's utter de-
pendence on higher powers that it contains. Only thus does it make
one underestand every current dominion as not necessarily the final,
the only possible, and the unsurpassable one. The fact that Zeus re-
mains, if not threatened, at least capable of being threatened makes
it impossible for him to be an absolutely threatening agency himself.
Myth pr'Jduces conditions of familiarity not only by means of its
all too human stories of the gods, by means of the frivolous
unseriousness of what they undertake among themselves, but also
above all by its lowering of the scale against which their power is
measured. If this could not have been invented within the mythical
framework itself, with the means proper to the Inythical talent for
invention, then it ceases to be possible to speak of invention at all
and everything is pushed off onto 'influence.' In view of the tinge of
disrepute that the term invention has in the regions of religion and
art, which are too sublime for that, it is not permissible to impute
'invention,' even where nothing [logically or genetically] prior fvorgegeben1
is evident, when a higher rank of necessity can be ascribed to the
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Part I
spirit or faith of the Hellenes. Here, 'Oriental influence' is only an

intermediate ad hoc solution that shifts the question of origin into still
older cultures but would always still leave open the question why
people were inclined to have recourse to 'essentially foreign'
Orientalisms.
How serious is the conflict between the gods? Undoubtedly, what
is at issue in the stepwise ordering of mythical epochs is no longer
existence, totality, and finality, but it is power, precedence, advantages,
positions. The relationship between immortality and the possibility of
defeat in battle is in any case, even for the archaic stories, hardly
capable of clarification: Banishment to the Isles of the Blessed is what
happens to Cronus; what had become of Uranus after his castration
remains obscure.
In the Iliad there is a conflict whose seriousness or unseriousness
is only reflected in the way in which Zeus perceives it:
But now strife fell on the other immortals, hatred

Both heavy and hard, for the spirit within them was blown
In conflicting directions. As fiercely they clashed with a deafening
Roar, the wide earth re-echoed their din and the huge vault
Of heaven resounded as if with the blasting of trumpets.
And Zeus, from where he sat high up on Olympus,
Heard the clashing and laughed to himself, delighted
To see the immortals at odds with each other. lo
The fact that the God of monotheism, continually occupied with the
uniqueness of his rank and his power, may not laugh is no doubt
related to the difference between myth and dogma. Jean Paul for-
mulated this in the single sentence "Gods can play, but God is serious. " I I
The interdict against laughter originated in philosophy. It descends
from the political utopia of Plato, who in his attacks on Homer, Hesiod,
and Aeschylus objected not only to equipping the gods with hatreds
and crimes, lies and tricks, metamorphoses and concealments, but
also to their laughter. Not only because they are gods, but also because
pleasure in laughter is objectionable in general. 12 In his republic, at
any rate, youth would not be allowed to be brought up with the
frivolity of Homer. According to Suetonius's account, the emperor
Caligula still appealed to this passage when he thought of extirpating
I-Iomer. Burckhardt connected this rigorism of Plato's with his pref-
erence for worlds beyond this one: "Now the complement to all of
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Chapter 4
this is the next world, of which he enjoys talking just as much as

Mohammed did."13
One must see it against this background when the Gnostic art myth
seeks precisely the violation of the philosophical precept [i.e., of the
interdict against laughter] by the demiurge. The quality of the demi-
iurge's creation is discredited when, in the Gnostic Cosmopoeia in Leiden,
he creates the world by laughing seven times, that is, by expelling
the sound "ha, ha, ha." With each eruption of this laughter he produces
a divine being, and specifically in the sequence Phos, Hydor, Nous, Physis,
Moira, Kairos, Psyche [Light, Water, Mind, Nature, Fate, Measure, Soul].14
The violation of the philosophical precept is also an expression of the
fact that the agency that is active here is itself meant to be put in an
ambiguous light. This already holds because the text is inclined toward
Gnostic magic and presupposes this in order to pass over the normative
and the actual prior 'givens' of the world as those of an illegitimate
order and to oppose to it a different will. That is the basis of the
innermost connection between Gnosticism and magic: depreciation of
what is actual as a legitimation of disregarding it in favor of one's
own will. The fact that magic is essentially a kind of 'cunning' [List],
that is, that it corresponds to a mythical category, removes it from
the fundamental conception both of the cosmos and of the creation.
But laughter also appears as an elementary form of generation else-
where in Gnostic systems where no preparation is being made for
magical intervention. 15 No doubt this also includes mockery of the
biblical form of 'high and mighty' establishment of the world by means
of the word of command.
It is significant that Zeus, in the story of Poseidon's tossing his trident
onto the Acropolis, chooses a court of arbitration as his means of
resolving the conflict. The introduction of quasi-legal transactions into
myth is characteristic of Zeus's epoch and of the means he employs.
But what law endures without means to put it into effect? Can a god
who does not submit to the rule of law still be punished, especially
in the pantheon of amoral gods? It is characteristic of the gods, whose
private morality was to give offense to all the critics, that they are
open to the rule of law. This is one of the presuppositions of the
system if those cannot be punished who, by their definition or at least
thanks to their enjoyment of nectar and ambrosia, are immortal.
For the preparation of the cosmic order in regard to which Hesiod
is an enthusiast, the punishability of the immortals is indispensable in
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Part I
one case: the instance when an oath is broken. The sacredness of the
oath for gods, too, is Hesiod's great concern, just as it is that of the
Old Testament authors in regard to their God's fidelity to the covenants
and promises, in regard to his remembrance of the mutual choice of
people and God. For Hesiod there would be no reliability in the world
if gods could not swear with an effective sanction. So they swore by
Styx. While Hades, a son of Cronus and brother of Zeus and Poseidon,
is a member of the most recent generation and becomes lord of the
underworld when the responsibilities are divided, Styx, to whom Hesiod
devotes a conspicuously extensive description, is one of the children
of Nyx, the night. In form she is scarcely distinguished from the river
in the underworld, which is an arm of Oceanus [the 'world sea'] and
surrounds Hades as the world river surrounds the world above it. It
is significant that Styx, together with her children, put herself on the
side of Zeus even before the decision between the Olympians and the
Titans.
We know how gods are punished for breaking oaths from a fragment
of the philosopher Empedocles, in which we hear of a dictum of Ananke
[necessity], an old decree of the gods. Among them, too, a perjurer
must be banished from the seat of the blessed for three times ten
thousand horae (years or seasons) and must traverse an involuntary
sequence of metamorphoses through all the possible forms of mortal
beings: transmigration of souls as the sanction of oaths among gods. 16
The swearing of oaths does not harmonize with myth, where no
deception is excluded. "God does not renounce deception, which be-
longs to him by right," Aeschylus still says. Consequently the oath
becomes the most important element in the production of distance
fronl the status naturalis [state of nature], whose overcoming is part of
the logos of myth. For an immortal, the sanction must be powerful,
and this is represented by its relationship to the oldest origin of the
genealogy of the gods, to the children of Nyx. In the case of the
oath-this one time, one might say-it is not enough that he who is
in fact preponderant binds himself; it is necessary to go to the roots
of the whole race of gods, 'to the mothers,' to the 'origins' that are
so misused by enthusiasts of myth.
Here an elementary dichotomy appears among the ways in which
man can arrange matters with superior powers, so as to live without
anxiety or only to be subject to definable conditions of 'fear of the
Lord.' There must be a weakening of the superior power which is not
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Chapter 4
carried out only by man, and there must be proofs of its reliability,
at least preliminary forms of lawfulness and of fidelity to agreements.
The technique of weakening operates through the division of power;
the exclusion of omnipotence; rivalry and entanglement in affairs; the
mutual jealousy and envy of the powers; their precinct and department
mentality; the complication of their genealogies and successions; and
the god's defined weaknesses and capacities for distraction. The pro-
cedure by which reliability is demonstrated is more historical in nature.
What is to be demonstrated is the god's continual adherence to his
vows, for example, to God's vow in the Bible, which is confirmed by
the rainbow, not to carry out a second extermination of mankind by
water, and not to let any faithlessness on man's part drive him to
break his oath.
Before the pistis theou becomes man's faith vis-a.-vis God, it is the
C
latter's form of historical identity as a named subject with its capacity

to enter into agreements. It is the God who has held to what he
promised to our fathers who possesses a basic form of provenness, a
sort of character, that is evident in the telling of the story. Bringing
out this element of divine fidelity in agreements is more than confirming
a juridical capacity to enter into agreements. Faithfulness to a covenant
is something that can be demonstrated and held fast, and summoned
up as a prophetic rebuke to the unfaithful party to the covenant, to
men, only by telling a true history, not a myth. What matters is not
that the written history is true but that it has to be true.
In connection with this basic form of the historiographical dem-
onstration of the god's identity, indefiniteness cannot be permitted.
One might say: Above all else, the chronology has to be in order.
This is the basis of one of the most important differences between
the Old Testament literature, along with the biblical theology that
finally emerges from it, and myth: the insistence on the reckoning of
time, on datability by means of the lifetimes of the patriarchs, by
means of the years the kings governed, by Ineans of genealogical
constructs. The destruction of the first Temple of the Jews (588 B.C.)
becomes the fixed reference day of a study of chronology whose
culminating point is the calculation - by Rabbi Hillel the Second, around
the middle of the fourth century of the Christian era-of the date of
the Creation of the world as falling on October 7, 3761 B.C. This date
is the reference point of the simply unsurpassable hOInogeneous cal-
endar a mundo condito [froIn the Creation of the worldl.
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Part I
Compared to this, the Greek attempts' to 'historicize' myth chron-

ologically remained feeble, for example, reckoning time from the
Trojan War. But here too the fact is not without value as an indicator
that one such attempt relates to the trial of Orestes before the Ar-
eopagus and relates a chronological series of generations (geneai) to
that. 17 For in the Attic state myth this is above all an event that makes
the work of myth pregnantly evident as the bringing to an end of
something that is no longer supposed to exist. But what matters is
the configuration, the eidos, not the dating (which is to be integrated
into one's own history in a somewhat careless manner). I am only
anticipating my discussion of the differentiation of the dogmatic from
the mythical I?ode of thought when I note here that negligence in
constructing chronology is one of the things that are inexcusable in
dogmatic observance. The compensation that observance furnishes in
return for this is that the 'history' it regulates is from the beginning
a history of man, which is preceded by nothing except the mere
preparation of the world for his entrance. He stands at the focus of
God's actions, and everything depends on God's behavior in relation
to man exclusively. Consequently the [comprehensive] history of his-
tories must possess continuous identity, reliable chronology and ge-
nealogy, localization and dating. This produces an entirely different
pathos from what can be characteristic of myth.
In myth there is no chronology, there are only sequences. Something
that lies very far back, but in the meantime has not been contradicted
or pushed aside, has an assumption of trustworthiness on its side. The
contest with the Titans, which was necessary in order for Zeus to
assert his power, lies far back, if only because at that time Prometheus
had betrayed his brothers and stood on the side of Zeus, whereas
since then he had had to give vent to, to work out and suffer the
consequences of his titanic disposition in the long confrontation with
the cosmocrator [ruler of the world]. It is only the extent of the material
that is fitted in between the earliest and the latest events that gives
the impression of extensiveness in time, of an undefined temporal
background and a foreground that did not come about overnight.
Pushing things to a distance is also the way to bring about the
suspension or deflection of questionability. Myths do not answer ques-
tions; they make things unquestionable. Anything that could give rise
to demands for explanation is shifted into the position of something
that legitimates the rejection of such claims. One can object that in
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Chapter 4
the end all explanations are of this type, however much trouble they
take over constants, atoms, and other ultimate magnitudes. But theo-
retical explanation must be prepared for the fact that it is compelled
to take the next step, to allow atoms to be followed by protons,
neutrons, and electrons as well as their variants and not to be able
to ward off the suspicion, in connection with these, that every rela-
tionship that can be measured in whole numbers points to yet another
level of elementary building blocks. Myths of creation a void this kind
of regress: The world is very much in need of explanation, but what
explains its origin comes from a great distance and tolerates no ques-
tions about its origin. With the concepts of philosophy, theological
dogmatics systematically consolidated this effect of making things un-
questionable. Eternity and necessity as attributes of the "highest being"
entail that it has no history.
In myth the prevention of intuition d serves this purpose. Chaos, in
the language of the Theogony, is not yet the disordered mixed state of
matter, of the plastic original material of everything that cornes later.
"Chaos" is the pure metaphor of the gaping and yawning open e of
an abyss, which requires no localization, no description of its edges
or of its depth, but is only the opaque space in which forms make
their appearance. Where they come from cannot be further inquired
into, just because to do so 'leads into the abyss.' The gaping or yawning
open - even if it is supposed to have been the opening of the silver
shell of Orphism's original egg-does not in the least 'explain' the
fact that the abyss becomes populated, that out of the darkness that
fills it Nyx and the children of the night arise.
The entire generative power of mythical potencies is described by
the fact that for them Aristotle's principle that like always produces
like, man produces a man, does not hold. Out of the night, all sorts
of awful and formless things can emerge, to occupy the edges of the
abyss so that one cannot see into the void. When anything can be
derived from anything, then there just is no explaining, and no demand
for explanation. One just tells stories. A late prejudice claims that this
does not produce anything satisfying. Stories do not need to push
forward to ultimate conclusions. They are subject to only one re-
quirement: They cannot run out.
Although myth refuses, and must refuse, to provide explanations,
it does 'produce' another life-stabilizing quality: the inadmissibility of
the arbitrary, the elimination of caprice. That is why it cannot be
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Part I
.
allowed to fall under the suspicion of being an artifact. It must be
accepted as a "psychological product of nature."18 The descriptive
report that "it is not affected by the arbitrary action of our will" can
confidently be treated as equivalent to the enthusiast's predication
that it is the "Word of God,"19 for that means simply that it is beyond
what man is capable of Myth can derive anything from anything, but
it cannot tell just any story about anything. This depends on the fact
that mythical powers are not capable of doing everything, though they
are capable of something that goes beyond everything else - they are
kreittones and kreittona [stronger, superior].20 Cassirer is entirely correct
when he says that least of all within mythical thought can one speak
of lawless caprice; but it is misleading when he describes this as "a
kind of hypertrophy of the causal 'instinct' and of a need for causal
explanation. "21 The offensiveness of the consciousness of accident is
eliminated, in mythical rationality, by connections that are not causal
and are not explanations. The need for explanation is suspended; the
empty positions into which it could penetrate are filled to a degree
of density that finally made myth irritating to Thales of Miletus: Every-
thing was full of gods.
Myth, then, does not speak of the beginning of the world, any more
than it speaks of its being bounded by Oceanus, which as the boundary
river would after all have to have another bank as well. What is more,
it not only leaves in obscurity what is obscure in any case, it generates
this obscurity and concentrates it. This is also why in the myths of
many groups of cultures [Kulturkreise), the diverse demiurges and culture
heroes - that is, the original founders of world history and human
history-do not at first occupy an outstanding position and are some-
times subordinate and comic figures. Prometheus is still a 'trickster'
in Greek comedy and satyric drama. That is also why the question
remains undecided as to who takes first place in the genealogy, whether
it is Nyx or Oceanus, darkness or the depths of the seas. Both are
suitable for the emergence of the next generation, with its monstrosities.
The horizon of myth is not identical with the philosophical limit
concepts; it is the margin of the world, not its physical demarcation.
This finitude, rich in forms, is a different one from that of the cos-
mological spheres. Schopenhauer conceptualized this procedure of
rendering things unquestionable. Myth, he says, "never became tran-
scendent," and that is precisely why the ancients "always remained
mythical": "Their theogony, like the sequence of causes, went back
In indefinitum [indefinitely], and they did not posit, with wooden se-
riousness, a Father of everything-if someone inquired curiously further
and further back, he was put off with a joke to the effect that first
there had been an egg, from which Eros "vas born-a joke that was
founded on a critique of reason that only lacked consciousness in
abstracto [abstract consciousness]. "22 It is the avoidance of the dialectic
of pure reason, of its cosmological antinomies, that is erroneously
shifted back into myth's mode of functioning. Rather than that, that
mode is a procedure by which to avoid the 'and-so-on' of the generation
of problems before it even gets started.
Still, it is correct to say that myth allows itself incompatible variants
in abundance, without ever risking the combined state of contradiction,
of antinomy. It is evident how incautiously one can see the late problems
of philosophy preformed (apart from their degree of abstraction) in
myth, as long as one is in possession of a philosophy of history that
assumes the constancy of the great questions for mankind, that assumes
a rationality of all mankind [die Menschheitsvernunft]. And beyond that:
A philosophy of history that assumes that where concepts do not yet
define the limits - and by their Greek appellation they are limit
definers - there the full seriousness of human consciousness cannot
have begun to operate yet.
Monotheistic dogmatism will compress everything together into the
pointlike quality of the beginning in the Creation. It will use even the
six days' work of creation only as an allegorical way of making om-
nipotence's momentary act of command comprehensible. In its ten-
dency, this is all decided in what Augustine calls the "thrust of creation"
(ictus condendi). The ambiguity and indefiniteness of the mythical mode
of thought's account of the beginning is not the result, perhaps, of its
having achieved as much clarity as it could, and then halted; instead,
it is an expression of the way it thinks. When it returns in the form
of the 'art myth,' it revels in its liberation from pressing questions,
from the discipline of avoiding self-contradiction, and, above all, from
definitiveness.
The Gnostic myth can attack Hesiod's chaos as an error, insofar as
it was meant as a description of 'the beginning.' What stands at the
beginning is not chaos but a shadow that is thrown. 2:~ A shado\v-
that is a good Platonic idea, and fits the Gnostic idea of the COSInos
as a cave. But in Plato's story the shadow is, after all, a secondary
phenomenon; a shadow requires a light, and a figure that casts it, and
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something on which it is cast. What pushes myth along is not the

effort of explanation but the relation to a scenario. In Gnosticism this
means that the Pistis Sophia ['Faith Wisdom'] mischievously and wan-
tonly generates a figure and that this figure, placed before the light
of the good, casts the shadow, which hypostatizes itself as the wall on
which it is cast, that is, which becomes the hyle [matter]. The gods do
spring from the abyss of chaos - in that respect the ancient myth is
correct - but they no longer do so as the firstborn products of the
world process but rather as its late and malformed offspring, as con-
sequences of the aping of the father's original self-production, by his
creature, the Pistis Sophia.
A new interest distinguishes this shifting of the beginning to a time
before the chaos from everything that had been important to the
Hellenic imagination. The central issue for Gnosticism is to situate
badness and wickedness, as identical, in the world, so as to compete
with the biblical story of the Fall. Unlike in the latter, in the Gnostic
myth the guilt for producing the world [die Schuld an der Welt] precedes
guilt in the world [die Schuld in der Welt]. Man moves out of the center
of guilt, since he no longer has a god to exonerate, because the origin
of the world is, as such, from the bad. This too is a way in which
myth diverts attention away from man; its drama remains the story
of the world, and the importance of that story reduces the superior
powers' interest in man. He is not the great sinner, but a piece of the
world containing a hidden spark of unworldliness. Nothing can be
allowed to depend on man if the attention of the foreign powers is
not to affiict and overwhelm him.
The figure of man is not associated with the beginnings. In myth
man is, judging by his derivation, more illegitimate than legitimate,
whether because he is still a descendant of an earlier dynastic phase
and does not fit into the new god's 'world picture' or because his very
creation and being kept alive are to spite this god. To that extent, the
fact that the gods in the end have human form themselves is a surprise,
rather than being the kind of preestablished premise that is created
by the biblical story of Creation when it has Elohim create man ac-
cording to his own image. How is myth's predilection for a background
of animal figures to be explained, when after all it tends so unremittingly
toward anthropomorphism? The simplest answer would be: Because
it could not display this tendency, in particular, without making man
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the topic, when he is after all only the beneficiary of the softening,
the depletion of power, and the processes that render harmless.
The fact that almost everywhere in the world the cults of gods with
human forms have animal cults in the background would seem to be
most readily explicable by the fact that the act of giving names, in a
life-world that is characterized by nature, first applies to those impres-
sions that represent Gestalts that are strictly reproduced according to
a form or species, and therefore make the most modest demands in
terms of the construction of concepts. Nature demonstrates for man
the concrete reproduction that he achieves only with such difficulty
in his own products and that is imitated, as it were, in the reverse
direction, in the accomplishment of concepts. It is more difficult to
conceive of and give a name to the identity of a numinous power that
manifests itself in thunder and lightning than it is to grasp and attach
a name to the combination of strangeness and familiarity in the ge-
netically reproduced physiognomies of animals. The trueness to type
of the animal figure creates, as it were, something that one can address.
Mythical gods are typical gods. What one can refer to [as a fixed
quantity] is not their moral identity, an identity connected to past
actions and pointing toward future ones, but rather the sameness in
kind of the characteristics and effects that are bound up with a particular
area of competence. One can only count on it, refer to it, in connection
with the particular episode in question. Nothing like a lifelong- to
say nothing of a national-relationship can be established.
Zeus is never described as remembering an act he had engaged in
previously; he has no history. Looked at over the long term, he is
unreliability incarnate. Only his situation within the complex of the
gods' powers indirectly determines in him a kind of reliability in spite
of everything. Only the fact that he cannot do everything makes him
bearable, for he is a god of storms who has risen in the world, just
as Yahweh is a god of volcanoes. Still, in this very respect the Old
Testament God is the most exact antithesis of Zeus, because he is
conjured up with the reminder that he led the people out of Egypt
and gave them the promised land of Canaan. By virtue of his identity,
he is the guarantor of a history and of the political constellations that
have grovvn out of that history. His prirnary demand, entirely in ac-
cordance with this characteristic, is that his partner should be true to
the alliance, to the covenant, to the history. He forgets, as though
intentionally, what he promised in case the other side \vas unfaithful.
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In myth, none of the stories leaves traces in the stories that come
next, however well they are subsequently interwoven with one another.
The gods produce stories, but they have no history. What is eternal
is a matter of indifference to them, just as it can be a matter of
indifference to those to whom their stories are told. What distinguishes
dogma from myth is just this, that it claims to contain, and institu-
tionalizes' what amount to 'eternal facts.' Although, in return for that,
it also contains eternal entanglements that no atonement can blot out
entirely, unforgivable offenses to the divinity like the mysterious sin
against the Holy Ghost, of which no one has ever discovered what it
could consist of.
As long as gods do not have human form, they have behavior, but
no motives. To that extent, Aesop's Ionic animal fables are a late
transfer of the anthropomorphic world of the gods back onto their
preliminary theriomorphic stages. It is a way of dealing with what is
typical that has become relaxed. As in the epic the gods are made to
fit the human norm, in the fable men are reflected on the level of
the animals. The Phrygian, Aesop, prefers animals as bearers of stories
that point to the aspect of man that already, in the Ionic culture,
begins to seem like a strange and inhuman quality: his typicalness.
I don't mean to make any assertions about the origin of fables here,
any more than about the origin of myth. But the omnipresent influence
of Aesop's fables in Hellenic civilization, extending even into Socrates'
prison cell, is amazing. Perhaps the subjects of Aesop's fables were
old animal gods in whom the mythical characteristics had been further
humanized, but where 'man,' instead of being made heroic as in the
epics, was moved forward to his bourgeois condition [Burgerlichkeit].
Then the animal subjects would already be parodies of Homer's gods,
who had still been heroic because they were modeled on the Hellenic
nobility. Instead of the frivolity of a life of leisure, which will be
disciplined for the first time by theory, they would have a disposition
to respectability [Biederkeit], which trails morality behind it. That would
be, beside the epic, another form of work on myth: beside the un-
demonized and poeticized gods, the urbanized ones. With them man
for the first time discovers in himself the strangeness of what has still
escaped individualization. Then the fable, though related to the residues
of the mythical transformation of monsters into animals and men,
would at the same time be opposed, as a type, to the all too easily
accomplished poetic humanization of the gods in the epics. The fact
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that something in the supposedly easy 'enlightenment' that took place

in the culture of the Ionic coastal cities, which also produced early
'theory,' had not been successful or carried through is most readily
demonstrated by the fact that after a delay of three centuries the
power of myth was still able to generate and sustain the whole world
of Greek tragedy.
The way in which work on myth presents itself in the ancient epics
is in its form - and not only in the content of what is narrated - itself
the successful result of this work. It becomes evident for the first time
what aesthetic modes of operation could accomplish against the un-
canniness of the world; to put it provocatively, too, lightning had not
struck the singer who had no longer taken Olympus all that seriously.
The one who suffers at the hands of the gods is Odysseus, who has
long since reached home, and not the singer who makes the gods
compete with each other over him.
Parody is one of the techniques of work on myth. In it the main
features of the ways in which myth functions are exaggerated, driven
to a limit at which their yield in terms of form expires. That this is
characteristic of late forms of the displacement of myth hardly needs
to be demonstrated; but the fact that it also already appears in the
early literary evidence that is still accessible to us is something that
is easy to overlook if one wants to keep it as source material for the
"faith of the Hellenes." Someone ought to have written about the
unbelief of the Hellenes.
Proteus is proverbially a figure representing the impermanence of
appearance, the unlimited capacity for transformation- he is the com-
ical epitome of the phenomenon of metamorphosis. He is a god of
the sea, by his name alone an old and original one, related to the
babel of forms in the depths. No doubt as a result of having the same
name as a prince of that region, he comes to Egypt, to the little island
of Pharos, near the Nile Delta, a taking-off point for voyages and
perhaps also an important oracle for fixing times of departure and
probable winds. This can be inferred from what the Odyssey tells us
about the experience of Menelaus, who was driven ashore there- an
experience Menelaus recounts to the young Telemachus at the palace
of Sparta, in the company of Helen, whom he has brought h01l1e
again. 2.1 On his voyage home from Troy, the gods had already kept
him on Pharos for twenty days, for lack of wind. In his perplexity he
turns to the Nereid Eidothea for help. She tells him to consult her
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father, Proteus, the ancient of the sea, ail Egyptian, who knows the
depths and the future.
The very old gods are always suspected of being capable of and
knowing more than the younger ones, in whom, along with power,
knowledge too has diminished. But Proteus is not to be held, for "it
is hard for a mortal man to bend an immortal to his will"-especially
Proteus, because he is not fixed to one form but can take on any of
them at a moment's notice. His daughter describes the secret of his
omnipotence over forms like this: "He will seek to foil you by taking
the shape of everything (panta de gignomenos peiresetai), of every creature
that moves on earth, and of water and of furious fire." If one knows
the sequence of changes in advance, one does not become confused
about his identity and one is able to hold him fast until he returns to
his original form (which remains unspecified). That is what happens,
too, and "the ancient god had not forgotten his craft and cunning.
He truly became in tum a bearded lion, a snake, a panther, a monstrous
boar; then running water, then a towering and leafy tree." But his
conquerors hold him fast, and when his repertory of transformations
is exhausted, he lets himself be induced to give up his secrets.
It goes without saying that the plastic and graphic arts are not equal
to the challenge of this parody of a category of myth, any more than
they are to that of the Gorgon Medusa; in the vase painting, Proteus
is represented as a man with a fish's tail, from whose body a lion, a
stag, and a snake emerge all at once. Plato subjects him to one of the
early allegorical interpretations, in the Euthydemus, seeing him, with
his substanceless capacity for transformation, as a prototype of the
Sophist. The eighteenth-century mythologist explains the piling up of
metamorphoses in connection with one figure as follows: "Happening
to be very learned in astronomy and the knowledge of winds, he must
have occasioned the story of his transformations by frequent changes
of his clothing and especially his headdress. "25
One would have thought that for a poet who takes metamorphosis
as the central quality of myth, because it is only through it that the
myth becomes something that one can narrate aesthetically, the figure
of Proteus would have to be practically the pivotal point of all of his
variations. But that is a hasty inference. Ovid mentions Proteus only
in passing. Proteus appears to him as one of those "quibus in plures
ius est transire figures" [who have the privilege of changing into many
forms].26 He had been seen both as a young man and as a lion, as a
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wild boar and as a snake and as a bull, as a stone and as a tree, as

flowing water, a broad stream, and, by contrast, as fire. The figure
lacks what is necessary for a story-namely, identity-at least within
an episode. It is pure differentness [Anderssein] to such an extent that
it no longer has any selfhood [Selbstsein], so that it explodes the principle
of myth's narratability. At the extreme limit of parody, myth destroys
itself.
Proteus also participated, with his wise counsel, in the union of the
Nereid Thetis with Peleus, which was to produce the hero whose
terrible wrath Homer celebrates in the Iliad. Zeus had had to relinquish
his own erotic interest in her after he had heard from Prometheus (in
return for setting him free) the oracle of his mother, which prophesied
Zeus's downfall at the hands of any son produced by his union with
Thetis. Moderation with respect to the protector of mankind had saved
him from the thoughtless act that would have begotten a greater one
than himself. So Peleus is supposed to receive as his wife the nymph
who was deprived in this way of the role of mother to a new generation
of gods - a generation that Achilles can represent only by distant
approximation. It is not surprising that in this connection - according
to a variant of Hesiod's Catalogues if Women-he meets with refusal.
It is not easy to replace Zeus as a lover, particularly when Poseidon
too is putting in claims. Consequently Peleus has to accommodate
Thetis with a wrestling match on the coast of Pelion. The joke in this
contest is the Nereid's relationship to Proteus, because she can change
her exterior rapidly, taking on terrifying forms-but like Menelaus
on the shore at Pharos, Peleus refuses to be daunted. He also has the
help of an intermediate being of the mythical world: the centaur
Chiron. 27 That Thetis, in spite of this echo of her relation to the
inhabitants of the sea, becomes the mother of Achilles assures us
retrospectively that the human form is her normal one.
Proteus's normal form remains undetermined. That is why this
figure has an unsettling effect in relation to the tendency of myth
toward anthropomorphism. In that connection we must not lose sight
of the fact that while the function of myth does depend on its figures
being anthropomorphic, the whole accent is on their having become
anthropomorphic and still bearing the marks of this becoming. Precisely
because the function of myth is centered on man's security in the
world, the complex of its forms and stories is not anthropocentric.
Man's status as beneficiary is always multiply indirect, being mediated
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Part I
by the quality of the world, which is the theine of myth. Arnold Gehlen
has the most concise statement of this situation: "The anthropomorphic
god is precisely the god who does not operate anthropocentrically; he
is not an Ariel. "28
Proteus is also involved in the story of Helen and of the mischief
that Zeus causes through her. According to a version preserved in
Apollodorus, Zeus's disputed daughter was not rea/iter [in reality] held
by Paris in Troy but was secretly carried off to Egypt, to the king of
Pharos, Proteus, who made a likeness of her out of clouds and foisted
it on Paris in Troy, while keeping the real Helen concealed for the
duration of the war. It was Menelaus, then, who again came into
possession of the genuine Helen without knowing about the intervening
substitution. This would explain the fact that he could still use those
violent measures against Proteus.
Docetism is the ontology appropriate to myth. It supports a kind
of evidentness that does not depend on the distinction between ap-
pearance and reality, and it makes possible any detour around the
center of seriousness. Helen's presence in Troy leads to the shedding
of the blood of the noblest of men; if, following Apollodorus's version,
she were only the lovely illusion of beauty, the myth would graze the
border of cynicism. The Trojan War takes place although the object
of the dispute, the object at issue, is not located in the center of pain
and SOITOW, qualities that elsewhere are the stigmata of unmistakable
reality. In myth precisely that cannot be the case; but it is nevertheless
instructive that Homer had not ventured into this kind of docetism.
In his poem, Helen strokes the wooden horse - the machine constructed
by Odysseus's cunning-and tries to tempt the Greeks who are hidden
within it into imprudent utterances by imitating the voices of their
wives. Everything would be lost if this were not, in person, the woman
around whom the battle had raged for ten years and was now about
to end.
It was Romanticism-intended as a reconciliation of the supposedly
oldest revelation with the newest one, rediscovered after the Enlight-
enment-when Schlegel said that the divine desires incarnation. Even
though the inhabitants of Olympus have human forms, they spare
themselves everything that would make this a reality in earnest: pain,
grief, old age, and death. Even when they appear in human form,
there is an 'echo' of animal form and animal countenance. It is not
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always possible to distinguish with certainty between metamorphosis

and simile, particularly in Homer. 29
The quantity of 'realism' that has been applied to this unresolved
dispute by philologians over a century and a half is amazing. Protecting
the 'dignity' of the Greek gods would have becolne a test of one's
humanistic seriousness even if Homer had imputed no other form to
them but that of birds. At least Hermann Frankel cannot have been
wrong in ascribing to the poet a kind of indecisionf ; only one should
not equate that with diminutions of his level of consciousness, to a
"kind of half-consciousness." Couldn't he also have played with the
theriomorphic background, or even alluded to it ironically?
Homer handles the expressions "cow-eyed" (for Hera) and "owl-
eyed" (for Athena) lightheartedly; but it must be assumed that cult
images and texts were still known to him in which the animal form
was fully present, which now only gives them the trait associated with
the eyes. The later Wilamowitz was correct when he said that we
would "not conclude from the Homeric poems that the Hellenes imag-
ined the epiphany of their gods in predominantly animal forms. "30
At the same time he makes the important observation in a note that
while, in the Iliad, the gods do take the form of a particular man
known to one of the heroes when they want to talk to him, at the
same time this is also the expedient adopted by their cunning, and
is foreign to their authentic reality: "When a god does not ,,,,ant to
be recognized, he appears to the one he addresses as a man"-not
as one whose form belongs to him, but as one whom he wants to
appear as. It is only for that reason that, in reverse, "a god can be
suspected when an unknown man is suddenly noticed and causes
astonishment. "31 The Locrian Ajax recognizes a god in the shape of
Calchas, from behind, by his gait; nothing is more plausible to the
singer than this, since "Gods are, indeed, easy to recognize. "32
We should not read the poet as though it were his job to SUlTI up
the state of belief of an epoch for us. He does vacillate between simile
and lTIetamorphosis-as even the authors of the New Testalnent do
in the passage where the Holy Ghost descends on the baptism in the
Jordan in the form of a dove: for Mark, Matthe,,,,, and John, like a
dove (hos peristera,), for Luke, in its bodily fonn (somatiko eidei); but in
Horner it is not a sort of uncertainty of his convictions or even just
of his opinions, but rather the playful reflection of the forms of ,vorship
and of story telling- regulated by no doglna and by ahnost no priestly
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discipline-of the entire Greek world. Precisely because all of this does
not have the utmost seriousness, it stands ready for the poet's frivolous
use. The pluralism of ideas and images - that is, of what he takes-
becomes the ambiguity of what he gives back. In connection with this,
he also expected that his public would not take at its face value the
superficial habit by which the Olympians were represented as men.
The Hellenic myths know nothing that goes beyond the present-
they have no utopia or eschatology. What would have been the result
if Zeus had not heard Prometheus's compelling warning to avoid the
bed of the Nereid Thetis, and not to beget a superson, is never said.
The other almost-super son, Hercules, allows us to conjecture that
the Greeks would have conceived the more powerful one as one who
could free the world from oppression and filth, on a grander scale.
The cosmos, then, would probably not have been at stake if Prometheus
had let Zeus procreate. But would this have benefited man, whose
character would then have become still more 'antiquated' than it was
for Zeus's world?
Nevertheless, the burdensome question, here as elsewhere, is, What
is still possible, or possible again? What recurrences are excluded,
what can still come about if the brightenings-up miscarry? Must one
regard metamorphosis as suggesting that at least an episodic return
of the gods to the circumstances of their origin and history is possible?
They do seem, in each of these acts, to be able to have recourse to
their earlier opacity and thus recklessness with respect to man, and
to allow themselves complete liberty to revert to irresponsibility. Each
metamorphosis nourishes the suspicion that worries us with the ques-
tion, What is the superior power still able - or again able - to do to
us? Can there be, here, the kind of breaking out by things that were
locked up that is illustrated by Pandora's box?
Monotheism also has its problem with regression, a problem that
presents itself, from the perspective of monotheism's self-understand-
ing, as man's weakness for the lower gods and for their (in comparison
to the God of the universe) moderate demands. While Abraham, when
he left Chaldea, had already turned his back on the animal-faced
Elohim and made his decision in favor of the One God, the totemistic
figures come through again and again, as in the ram as the substitute
sacrifice for Isaac, in the [literal] scapegoat of the Day of Atonement,
and no doubt also in the golden calt: amalgamated with the Egyptian
Apis. 33 Assuming this speculation about the Elohim background to be
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correct, the threat of Egypt to the developing system of the high God
would be that much more comprehensible and the rigor of the forty-
year-long wandering of a whole generation in the desert in order
definitively to exhaust the mythical gods would be an understandable
therapy against the continual threat of regression to the preliminary
and transitional stages characterized by theriomorphic and terato-
morphic [animal- and monster-shaped] divinities, so as finally to reach
a point of no return. This finality of the decision against myth's 'rule
of many' [Polykratie] was itself deposited in a canonical myth by which
it can be recalled. "Up, make us gods, which shall go before us," cry
the people, at the foot of Mount Sinai, when Moses does not return
from the mountain. When he brings the tablets of the law down from
the mountain and sees the golden ox idol, what had seemed to be
secured by the exodus from Egypt goes to pieces before his eyes.
What Pharaoh had failed to do - to bring back the people who were
fleeing from him-Apis, the bull god of the Nile valley, had succeeded
in doing. "And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the
camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed
hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and broke them beneath
the mount.' '34
The destruction of the idol has a magical power and parodies the
longing to have a god whom one can entirely incorporate, with whom
one can become identical: "And he took the calf which they had made,
and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon
the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it." Then he has
the men of the tribe of Levi slay the idolaters. The great decision is
made visible as the reversal of the totem meal. The rule for the latter
is that the favor of an ancestor or a tutelary spirit is tested and ensured
by the exceptional eating of what normally cannot be killed or eaten
or even injured or touched. Here lies the limit concept of the intention
of all ritual and of the mythical, interlinear interpretations belonging
to it: to eat the god. Moses demonstrates to the dancers around the
golden calf that every false covenant brings only death.
The bloody restitution forms a transition to the agelong discipline
of the Law, the impossibility of complying with which Paul will explain
as entailing the necessity of a different justification. But the worship
of the invisible One in Israel, is never the entirely unquestionable
reality that it appears to those who come later. In a last effort to
restore the unity of the Davidic kingdom and the centering of \vorship
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Part I
in Jerusalem, King Josiah of Judah (who died in 609 B.C. at the battle
of Megiddo, against the Egyptians) not only had to rediscover and
proclaim the book of the Mosaic law but also once again had to destroy
shrines of bull idols, still of the Egyptian type. More than half a
millennium since the desert wanderings had not been enough to make
people satisfied with the impossibility of seeing or making an image
of God.
Instituting this had meant instituting a great self-denial, even if it
was to prove unexpectedly true, over the long term, that an invisible
God who spoke out of books had unlimited transportability insofar as
dogmatic rigorism preserved his definiteness as a Gestalt composed
of attributes. The loss of the Temple at the beginning of the sixth
century B.C. deprived the Jews' relationship to God of its last remnant
of visibility - the cult - and reduced it to the possession of his name
and of the Law. The Chaldean exile returned them to the place by
leaving which Abraham had renounced Elohim and followed his elective
God. This first exile, which ended with the reestablishment of the
Temple in Jerusalem in 516 B.C. and the completion of the restoration
by Ezra and Nehemiah, was the paradigm of the second; it created
the (once again) mythical quality of the certainty of the fact that, and
the way in which, one could maintain the identity of a history without
territory and without a national cult, merely on the strength of the
divine name and the book. The draconic catharsis of all visibility
became the origin of the God of theology, and of his image-free
metaphysics.
This cannot be regarded as a triumph of pure spirit if only because
the longing for the old gods remained awake precisely under the
pressure of the requirement that they be forgotten, and again and
again provided itself with images and stories. One may hesitate and
feel reluctant to say that Christianity, unexpectedly and contrary to
its antecedents, went halfway to meet this pressure and enriched the
invisible One with elements of a perceptual and narrative character.
True, it did not need to go back to animal physiognomies again in
order to prevail over the Hellenistic world; but for more than a mil-
lennium it created combinations of dogma and image, of concept and
perceptivity, of abstraction and narrative. The God to whom marriage
and family were forbidden, because they would have led him again
into stories rather than into history, 35 nevertheless now had a Son,
whose Incarnation as man seemed to combine both of these. The
threat to this 'hypostatic union' no longer lay only, or primarily, in a
reversion to images, but rather in the absolutism of transcendence,
in the imperative metaphysics of divine autarky and the abstractions
of dogma.
The gods whom the one God does not want to have beside himself
are not deprived of their existence - questions of existence in general
being something that first arise in philosophical discussion and in the
determination of what deserves philosophical proof- but remain the
gods of others, foreign gods, or become demons. As such, and this is
not accidental, they take over the qualities of myth's mode of func-
tioning, but now with the sign inverted ~nd in grotesque caricature.
Satan, in the Christian tradition, is, like Proteus, a figure that exaggerates
the mythical repertory, summing up all the means that can be employed
against a theological authority characterized by reliability and com-
mitment to man. The devil's nature is freedom from any nature, the
omnipotent self-disposition of metamorphosis, which allows us to
glimpse animal attributes. It has not been sufficiently recognized that
in the whole way he is equipped, he represents the opposite of dogma's
substantial realism. In the figure of Satan, myth has become the sub-
version of the world of faith that is disciplined by dogma. The devil's
animal-like extremities and attributes, which are all that the imagination
has left on which to exercise itself freely, are symptoms of the precarious
readiness to regress into myth that characterizes every stage of its
.
overcomIng.
The timid polytheism of the Renaissance, which remains mostly on
the level of costume, can be seen as a tamed version of the demonology
that, toward the end of the Middle Ages-in the thirteenth and four-
teenth centuries - broke through the realism of Scholasticism, which
was growing tired, and took on luxuriant forms. There, aesthetic
grounds were sufficient to award precedence to the ancient gods. True,
they had been immoral and they again made their appearance in the
nude, but none of them had been suited to the role of the evil principle.
The way in which metamorphosis functions as an antithesis to the
Incarnation was described as early as the first half of the thirteenth
century by a great theoretician of demons, the Cistercian Caesarius
of Heisterbach, in his DiaLogus M iraculorum. The devils - who easily go
over into the plural-acquire bodies, as horses, dogs, cats, bears, apes,
toads, ravens, vultures, or dragons, or they acquire the grotesque mask
of a human being, in a way that insidiously mocks the Incarnation:
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Part I
They collect human sperm that has been dissipated in ways contrary
to nature and use it to make bodies for themselves. Thus, says the
demonological specialist, they can be seen and touched by human
beings. That would be Proteus as a parody of metamorphosis once
again, if it did not have the blasphemous thrust aimed at the central
kerygma - deprived of all docetism by centuries of effort- of Chris-
tianity. The antithesis to dogma is an artifact, as a means by which
to imagine an antiworld.
If one looks for a universal instrument to describe myth's modes
of procedure, "circumstantiality" will do as at least an approximation.
What this can point to or at least outline must again be considered
against the background of the absolutism of reality. The feeling of
utter dependency implies the wish that the superior power might hold
still, remain occupied with itself or at least-if its goodwill cannot be
established-operate with the delays involved in circumstantiality. Our
age, in which rapid decisions and striking dealings on a large scale
are admired, has lost touch with the experience that circumstantiality
can be merciful. The illustration of this that simply cannot be exhausted
is the sudden change in the fundamental mood of the early period
of Christianity from an impatient anticipation of the impending and
abbreviated summary proceedings of the apocalypse to fervent en-
treaties that it should be delayed. To know that one is not yet-and
is continually less and less - equal to the demands of the end is to
come to terms with the world again. This is not the kind of circum-
stantiality in relation to which absolute power would tum out to be
finite, but it is the kind with which that power confirms the 'consti-
tutional' limits it has vouchsafed to us.
The powers of myth simply cannot be pictured as able to have
what they want in whatever way they like. They have to submit to
procedures, however questionable these may be from a moral point
of view. Without artifice and disguise, without metamorphosis and
compromise, without checks to and retardation of arbitrary power, it
wouldn't come off. Even the punishment of others by turning them
into things is an index of the resistance that the intention of sheer
annihilation would encounter.
Even the most irate god is forced into circumstantiality: Zeus cannot
destroy with a thunderbolt the thieves who have stolen the honey of
the sacred bees in the cave where he was born on Crete, because
Themis and the Fates prevent this; it would not be in keeping with
the sacred (hosion) to have someone die on this spot. Embarrassed as
to how to carry out his will, Zeus turns the thieves into birds. Burckhardt
remarks, regarding the criticism of this characteristic of myth, that if
"the highest justice was demanded of the gods, and their failure to
implement it was criticized, then people should have imputed om-
nipotence to them as well. "36
Burckhardt finds a relevant bit in Apollodorus, which he describes
as an "incomparably remarkable story." In it Zeus is "just powerful
enough to help fate, which has gotten totally muddled on account of
two animals, to escape from its dilemma." The Theban fox was fated
never to be caught, while the lot of the Athenian hound was to catch
everything that he pursued. Thus, when the two animals met, the
result had to be a most distressing situation for a reliable administration
of the world. Zeus resolves the dilemma by abruptly turning both
animals to stone. 37 It is a typical paradox of the kind that hypercritical
late ages devise in relation to their obligatory contents. It is certainly
not below the level that the Talmud or Scholasticism were to reach
with their difficulties regarding omnipotence. Only, the solution gen-
erated by a theology of attributes would have been of a different kind.
One only needs to imagine how the entanglement would have
looked in the theological language of the schools: Can God create a
fox that cannot be captured by any other animal? Necessarily yes,
otherwise he would not be omnipotent. Can God create a hound that
catches everything he pursues? Necessarily yes, since he must be able
to do anything that is free of contradiction. But what if this hound is
put on the trail of that fox? No great imagination is needed to frame
the formula of acumen that would resolve the problem: A God \-vhose
omniscience had foreseen the dilemma of a world in which this fox
and this hound were present could arrange the world in such a way
that the hound would never encounter the fox. Since Zeus does not
unite such far-reaching capabilities, he uses metamorphosis to prevent
the motion that is presupposed by the paradox from occurring in the
first place. In the opposite case, the far-flung fate of Odysseus as he
is driven about can be described by the formula that only the incapacity
of the Earthshaker [Poseidon], who is angry with him, to bring about
his destruction, as well as the powerlessness of the other gods \-vho
favor him to secure him his homecoming against the Earthshaker's
will, takes on the lasting fonn of merely keeping him distant from
the goal of his desires. So the basic pattern of the Odyssey, too, is laid
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Part I
down by polycracy [the rule of many], as 'is declared immediately at

the beginning of the epic.
The archaic division of powers also means that the competence of
each of the gods in relation to human life is only partial. In the course
of time or from place to place that life moves from the competence
of one to the competence of another. When, in Tartarus, one has
finally passed the ferryman Charon, the watchdog Cerberus, and the
judges of the dead, one is beyond the reach, under the authority of
Hades and Persephone, of the goddesses of fate. This is the reference
of Socrates's obscure answer, in the Phaedo, to Cebes's question whether
one is not obliged to cling to life so as not to escape from the power
of the gods: Socrates hopes in death to meet, no doubt, different gods
but good ones. That is a formula that mixes mythical and philosophical
material; that they are different gods is myth; that they are good is
philosophy. As early as his dissertation on Socrates, Kierkegaard dealt
this compound the lapidary counterblow: "Only when one comes to
know that it is the same God who has led one by the hand through
life and who at the moment of death releases one, as it were, so as
to open his embrace and receive the soul filled with longing.... "38
This formulation renders harmless the problem of the identity and
ubiquity of the One against whom nothing can stand. It is too obvious
to Kierkegaard that his God always has the same significance for
human life, despite the fact that the risk involved in the quality of
this One, once he has permitted doubt regarding the certainty of
salvation, is an absolute risk.
Translator's Notes
a. Der Glaube der Hellenen [The faith of the Hellenes] {cited in note 20 to this chap ted is the
major work of Wilamowitz's maturity.
b. This is the title of a scene in Part Two of Goethe's Faust, which (unlike the traditional 'witches'
Sabbath' Walpurgis Night of Part One) is full of such 'classical' monsters as sphinxes, griffins,
sirens, and centaurs.
c. Pistis theou could originally mean the faithfulness of God, or an assurance of his faithfulness,
as well as man's faith in God.
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Chapter 4
d. Prevention of Anschauung "viewing," "contemplation," "intuition." See translator's note 0

to part 2, chapter 3. The point is the origins are not presented as something that one can
'picture. '
e. Chaos, in Greek, derives from the verb chainein, to yawn, gape, or open wide.
f. See Hermann Frankel, Die homerischen Gieichnisse (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1921).
Part II
Stories Become History
1
The Distortion of Temporal
Perspective
Was will Er denn mit der ungeheuren Zeit all anfangen?

-Buchner, Woyzeck
[What does he think he'll do with that monstrous stretch of time?]
Iconic constancy is the most characteristic element in the description

of myths. The constancy of its core contents allows myth to appear,
embedded as an 'erratic' element, even in traditional contexts of a
different kind. The descriptive predicate of iconic constancy is only a
different way of expressing what impressed the Greeks in myth as its
archaic antiquity. Its high level of durability ensures its diffusion in
time and space, its independence of circumstances of place and epoch.
The Greek mython mytheisthai [to tell a 'myth'] means to tell a story
that is not dated and not datable, so that it cannot be localized in any
chronicle, but a story that compensates for this lack by being 'significant'
[bedeutsam] in itself.
The early Christian authors still believed that the reason a story
could become so old was simply that it enjoyed the special protection
of mernory as a result of the truth that it contained. The patristic
practice of allegorical interpretation is founded on this assumption. It
is the procedure by which one reestablishes the archaic truth content.
Thus mneme [memory] becomes the unerring organ for detcnnining,
if not what is true, at least what is significant.
The assertion that myth could not be invented is just another \vay
of describing this situation. Myth, according to Schelling's dictuln, is
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Part II
"one of the primeval ideas that force their way into existence." This
is said in connection with Prometheus's theft of fire. It would not,
then, be "an idea that a human being [could have] invented."l
A unit myth is a ritualized body of text. Its consolidated core resists
modification and, in the latest stage of dealings with the myth, provokes
it, after peripheral variation and modification have increased the fas-
cination [a] of testing the durability of the core contents under the
pressure of the altered circumstances of their reception, and [b] of
uncovering the hardened, fundamental pattern. The more audaciously
this pattern is overtaxed, the more sharply [pragnanter] what the at-
tempts to surpass it relate to must show through.
In the end, only inversion, only firm negation, is possible. When
Paul Valery wants to be able, in Mon Faust, to offer a conclusively final
realization of the modem myth, he can indeed reverse the fundamental
pattern of the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles, but
only by allowing it to continue as a relationship of 'temptation.' He
who was once the tempted now becomes the tempter of his outdated
confederate: Let him [Mephistopheles] take over what has already
become the "Faustian" role. To make it possible to write not just
'one's own' but a 'final' Faust, the figure of curiosity can himself
become the opposite figure, one of satiation with knowledge, in other
words, of immunity to seduction by the elemental enticement of the
modern age. The result is that it is the devil who needs to be reju-
venated. In the confined space of the constant configuration, all of
this could not be brought into relief against the tempi passati [times
gone by] if the names and attrributes were not familiar of old and
had not penetrated deeply into the fundamental stratum of our culture
[den Bildungsgrund1. Bringing the myth to an end [das Zuendebringen des
Mythos] fortifies its survival in a new, overall state. Valery presents the
Faust motif as an exhausted form: ')' espere bien que Ie genre est
epuise" [I certainly hope the genre has been exhausted], he has not
Faust but Mephistopheles say. But the comedy in which the author
wants to make his subject play itself out is wrecked by the hermit's
high alpine maledictions on the world.
If one asks oneself the question what is the source of the iconic
constancy of unit myths, then there is one answer, an answer that
sounds trivial and all too simple to satisfy our expectations: The fun-
damental patterns of myths are simply so sharply defined [pragnant],
so valid, so binding, so gripping in every sense, that they convince us
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Chapter 1
again and again and still present themselves as the most useful material
for any search for how matters stand, on a basic level, with human
eXIstence.
Is this answer too simple? And if it is not, how do we explain the
amazing fact that in the early morning of our tangible literary history
those icons appear that tum out to be capable of this improbable
survival all the way to the present - a survival that can be identified
throughout a tradition that put such materials under the pressure of
its upheavals, its almost total losses, its exertions aimed at innovation
and newness? Tylor spoke, in ethnology, of "survivals."2 But what
causes survival? A model explanation of such phenomena is the ex-
planation in terms of innate ideas. It does not return for the first time
in depth psychology's notion of "archetypes," but already in Freud
in the assertion of universal infantile experiences-in other words, of
universal experiences that are archaic a for the individual. Thus one
understands "the gripping power of Oedipus Rex" precisely because
the psychic basis of this myth is familiar to everyone: " ... the Greek
myth seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he
has felt traces of it in himself."3 In this type of explanation, the capacity
for survival that a fictive material possesses becomes a piece of ,nature,'
and thus something into which further inquiry is impossible.
To create space for a different explanation, we must free ourselves
from an illusion of temporal perspective. Homer and Hesiod are our
first and, at the same time, most lasting authors of fundamental mythi-
cal patterns. Homer is this, if for no other reason because our written
literary tradition begins with him. But because he is also one of the
greatest members, if not the greatest member, of that tradition, the
scandal of the fact that we have to accept something so imposingly
mature as its very first item remains concealed from us. This is the
opposite of our need to see such an accomplishment only late, only
on the high point of mankind's path at which we have arrived.
Here we can be misled by our experience in historiography. For
in fact what appears on the basis of the written evidence that has
come down to us as something very early and old must be regarded
from the point of view of the history of man as something very late
and already coming close to us in time. Here writing makes the ac-
cidental difference. Its range cannot furnish the standard of ,vhat is
necessary for a historical identity that already extends into and ,vas
taken up in those earliest works of Homer and Hesiod. Writing un-
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Part II
doubtedly promotes permanence, but it did not produce what it was

given the job of preserving. For a culture of writing, what is more
characteristic is the corruptibility of the sources, which arises from the
copyists' lack of understanding of what they have to transmit.
The mode of writing makes it possible for variants to have a point
of reference. What is new in each case does not take the place of
what it goes beyond, and make it disappear, but is simply superimposed
on it, and produces - the history of literature. At the same time it
produces the stimulus to make one's bold venture visible in the form
of a variant. Transfiguration is made possible only by contrast with
a configuration that is enduring.
One can and must proceed from the assumption that the age pre-
ceding the writing down of the early epics, the age in which their
contents and forms originated, was several times longer than the
passage of continuous written tradition that has been annexed to it.
Much more important is the fact that that nonliterate prehistory must
have enforced a more fine-textured and intensive testing of the reliable
effectiveness of all the ingredients than their whole subsequent history
in the form of 'literature' - especially in the form of material canonized
for reading in school-could accomplish. The age of oral communi-
cation was a phase of continual and direct feedback regarding the
success of literary means. It is most nearly comparable to the situation
in which rhetoric originated, in which, however, the concrete function
[of the delivery] determines the interests and the choice of listeners.
Nothing is more unsparing for a text than oral delivery, especially
before a public that wants to have a festival and knows how to im-
plement that claim.
It must already have been a moment of fatigue, in that age of
incubation, when Homer-whoever and however many he may have
been - sat down or had a scribe sit down before him to write down,
and thus to finalize, the ancient inheritance, what perhaps seemed to
him to be the endangered ancient inheritance, of the stories and poems
that were carried from place to place. I imagine him as a person who
was full of anxiety about the continuance of the world in which he
lived, and who perceived himself as the preserver of what was best
in it from destruction. Even if that should be an exaggeration, in any
case it illustrates the way our temporal perspective is corrected by the
realization that what is earliest for us was already, in its immanent
history, something late. Herodotus was still to deliver his historical
narratives to the public by means of oral recitation; but Thucydides
already reproached him for the frailty of this impermanent mode of
proceeding and contrasted to it his own turning toward the future as
the audience for his work.
The asymmetry of these superepochs of human history - the epoch
of word of mouth and the epoch of the written word-draws attention
to the difference of the conditions under which traditions are developed.
In a culture characterized by writing, the selection accomplished by
the word-of-mouth process is fundamentally lost to view; canonical
complexes arise, obligatory quotations, original texts, and finally critical
editions of those texts. The primacy of a religion that is based on
written texts creates an exemplary way of handling written material.
The obligatoriness of dogm2. is founded on and operates through the
agency of writing.
In this mode of transmission only corruption remains possible - no
longer optimization. Early Christian authors saw the spiritual 'prehis-
tory' constituted by the ancient world as a period characterized by
the misunderstanding and degradation of very old knowledge of the
Pentateuch and its history of origins. If the pagan authors had acquired
biblical materials through forgotten contacts, then this was supposed
in the end, after a long process of corruption, to spur them to seek
access to the authentic material of revelation again. Thus, according
to Lactantius, the creation of man from clay, in the Prometheus myth,
is authentic tradition, in which only the name of the creator is a
spontaneous 'and by no means unimportant falsifying addition. The
impression of the facts of the case survives more easily in the medium
of frivolity than does the memory of the narne. 4 But where everything
depends on the action being ascribed to the 'correct' agent, the fact
that the name was forgotten is inexcusable. What had been spoiled
by oral transmission is at least recognized and regainable for the person
who approaches the written texts that are cared for by the church. r
)
'Transmission by word of mouth favors the 'pregnance' of what is

transmitted, at the expense of historiographical or supposedly histo-
riographical precision. It creates no obligatoriness except \vhat is con-
tained in the outcome of its processes of testing, in the fact that wha t
has been preserved has been preserved. The memorability and inl-
pressiveness of what it was capable of[producingl are not present from
its beginning, but only at its end. Thus the unique context conditioning
the testing of contents and forms, a context that can never be rees-
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Part II
tablished, is prior to the application of writing. Everything depends

on whether a material-as a work, or not yet as a work-is already,
in the broadest sense, canonized for the process of reception and can
hold its own on the strength of that, despite any dislike and reluctance
on the part of apathetic schoolboys-or whether it has to be offered
and tendered, by an author or a transmitter who seeks applause and
reward at all costs, to an audience that is free to make any judgment
and react in any way. The antinomy of the melancholy author and
the audience that is intent on pleasure is the strange phenomenon
produced by an Alexandrian cultivation of professionals that, putting
its authors in a protected reserve composed of media and critics,
permits and pays them to set themselves against their audience and
even deride it if it is not willing to be displeased.
Tacitus nostalgically reports to his audience, which has been spoiled
by writing, on the Germans' cultivation of oral memory. 6 When Wilhelm
Grimm presented his edition of Old Danish Heroic Songs) Ballads) and
Tales to Goethe, he explained the quality of the material he had dis-
covered as follows: "The fact that these songs have remained alive
through such long periods, have moved, delighted, and touched so
many hearts, have been sung anew by so many people, is also the
reason why they remain invulnerable to modem criticism and can
very well endure being called inferior by an individual today."7 In this
connection one should also think of the history of New Testament
texts within the early Church, for instance, the story of the birth of
Jesus in Luke, which, if not the narrative of a miracle, is certainly a
n1iraculous narrative and must have surpassed a large part of the
apocryphal material to such an extent that it could not itself become
apocryphal. Something like that, once it had been heard, could not
be forgotten, nor, I daresay, could it any longer be excluded from
the canon. No wonder the rigorism that makes feelings inadrnissible
accomplished precisely this, without any trouble: In the first 'Bible
criticism,' carried out by Marcion, the text on the birth of Jesus is set
aside.
But this congregation was not the author of its texts. It accepted
and rejected what it could never have made up. In the course of the
destruction of the principle that men or personalities or geniuses make
history, New Testament textual criticism also went over to making the
congregation the subject of history and the source of its stories. But
it was not even able, with its late Romantic postulate, to confront
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Chapter 1
Albert Schweitzer's old question, "Why shouldn't Jesus be able to think

dogmatically and to actively 'make history' just as well as a poor
evangelist who, being compelled to it by the 'theology of the con-
gregation' ['Gemeindetheologie'], has to put what Jesus does on paper?"
This rebuke is just as applicable when the question is shifted to the
poor evangelist himself, who is only supposed to be able to write down
only what the collective dictates to him.
The idea of collective invention [or "making up": Erfindung] is an
individual invention made up by the Romantics, who longed not to
be what they were and what they were expected to be. It was supposed
to be the spirit of the people [Volksgeist] that had made up the folk
songs and written the people's book. We can see from the example
of Luther's chorales the limits of what a congregation is able to do:
It does not sing along, among the endless number of verses, with
those that evidently diverge from the others and that don't seem to
it convincingly to belong in the chorale. Ministers or organists who
diverge from the canon of their congregation's favorite verses make
themselves unpopular.
In other respects the texts prescribed for ceremonies of worship
are distinguished more by monotony and by disregard for the lay
people, who find in the ceremony no possibility of resisting the texts
that are chosen by the priests. The Greeks had the good fortune not
to have to receive their myths from the cultivation of their priests.
Otherwise they would perhaps have had the same experience that
the modem audience has at inaugural festivities: the experience of
having to accept, under the sanction of a metaphysical aesthetics,
almost anything that is demanded of them by their 'priests.'
The rhapsodist of the early Greek epic appears to me absolutely
as one who offers pleasure and amusement, one who adapts himself
with precision and flexibility to his audience and its desires. The fact
that he can draw in and transform myths and make Olympus accom-
modate itself even to the desires of his listeners is not only his own
daring vis-a.-vis sacrosanct materials, it is also the disposition of these
materials to such deformation, a disposition that is given, and grows,
with the 'late' condition of myth. For selection, and the readiness to
engage in it, there are favorable factors, such as the combination of
oral delivery and the darkness of nighttiIne. Homer hilTIself makes us
conscious of these factors as the situation of his Odysseus at the court
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Part II
of the Phaeacians, when he has Alcinoiis urge him to further narration

of his adventures and sufferings:
... The night is long and lies before us,
Indescribably long, nor is it yet time to retire.
Continue, then, if you will, your account of these thrilling
Adventures. Truly, I could sit right here
In the hall until bright morning, if you were willing
To go on telling this marvelous tale of your woes. 8
This night is only one of the infinitely many long nights that there
were before the technology of lighting freed at least its intellectual
beneficiaries from reliance on recitation by others. "Nyx hede mala
makre athesphatos ... " [The night is very long- indescribably long
(Odyssey XI, 373)]. Alcinoiis explicitly compares Odysseus with an expert
singer who has to recite a myth. But the circle of his wanderings is
not yet closed. Only when it is, in the first night of his return to his
marriage bed with Penelope, is the identity of adventurer and storyteller
complete as the epitome of effectiveness:
... And Zeus-descended Odysseus
Described all. ...
She listened with keen delight,
And no sweet sleep fell on her lids till he
Had finished his story.9
At the same time it is a scene of the highest 'realistic' legitimation,
which the singer of the epic provides for himself; for the material of
the singer's poem is in fact precisely what Odysseus has to tell his
faithful wife in this night of the most confidential truth.
If one looks back at the singer of the epic and at his audience, there
is hardly anything comparable to the author of the work of art, in a
late age, on whom the aesthetics of Idealism laid the burden - or to
whom it gave the distinction-of total responsibility for his work. Not
accidentally, however, one-perhaps the only-approximation to the
poetic trials of strength of the early times is again connected with the
name of Homer. The act is entitled "Voss Reads His Homer in Wei-
mar." In 1 781 his translation of the Odyssey, after failing to attract
enough subscribers, had appeared with the note, "Published at the
author's expense"; in 1793 the translation of both epics appeared in
four volumes. The year after that, Voss ,vas in Weimar, where the
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Chapter 1
authority of the great translator into German, Wieland, already stood

against him. So far, his efforts would have been "wasted, as far as
the gentlemen in Weimar are concerned," was his response to Herder
when the latter invited him to read from the Iliad; his translation was
intended "for live recitation, to be taken in by the ears, not by the
eyes." Thus it comes to a trial of strength between Herder and Wieland.
Herder's verdict dismisses all accusations of artificiality and instances
of excessive daring: " ... he thought he was listening to Homer him-
self. "10 Voss couldn't have asked for more. Or, actually, for only one
thing more: for Goethe's concurrence.
That he receives on the following day. He reads, in Goethe's house,
the storm in the fifth book of the Odyssey and the whole story of
Nausicaa. "Goethe came and shook my hand and thanked me for
such a Homer." 11 The success was so impressive that now Wieland,
too, was convinced: " ... he didn't understand how he could have
failed to appreciate me. It was only from me that people could learn
how Homer ought to be read .... " Voss may have learned something
about the situation of the Homeric singer from his own success. When,
the year after that, he speaks against the denial that the two epics
were written by the same poet, he appeals not to philological arguments
but to the singer's situation in relation to his audience as one of
immediate feedback: "But I don't find it incomprehensible that an
extraordinary spirit such as shines forth from every detail-among
Greeks, such as we know them from his poems-being occupied en-
tirely and solely with his art, which is admired, and returning more
inflamed and more familiar with himself from each performance that
has been understood and sympathetically appreciated, was finally able
to develop such a great work from such a simple germ, and to fill it
all with life." 12
What Voss calls the justification of his Homer, which "our public
would no doubt follow in time," was accomplished in an oral 'per-
formance,' one that may have been all too successful when one con-
siders the vague and shopworn quality of the formulas that Voss caIne
up with. It was the end of an enormous disappointment. In 1779,
when he had already published two books of his translation of the
Odyssey, he was forced to acknowledge that he was "probably not
working for the audience of today," and consequently intended only
to finish the present job: "For \\That is one supposed to write for a
people that is indifferent to the grandest of all poems?"I:) Expressing
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Part II
his resignation in the language of one who sells at a booth at a fair,

he says that he expects "such a small audience that I won't make
enough to pay for the booth and the lights." People pay for private
lessons in grammar, but "no one wants Homer"; philological learning
is more respected than what it is supposed to enable one to enjoy.
"If Homer were alive today, I think Ernesti and Heyne would sneer
at him not a little for concerning himself with such useless amusements
for idlers, and that out of a conceited thirst for fame. "14 In 1791, with
the work on the Iliad before him, he still speaks of his audience's
dislike for Homer, of the disposition's inadequacy to the object, like
this: "But first the Gennans must become less political, less philosophical
and less precocious; otherwise the childlike old man will still always
come too soon." 15
Of course the origin of the epic is not identical with that of myth;
on the contrary, the former, as work on myth, already presupposes
the long work of myth on the primary matter of the life-world. But
even if the market for stories and songs did become more refined
and ritualized, still the technique of selection and testing in the sphere
of oral communication was hardly capable of great differentiation.
Some things are made tangible by the institution of the contest of
singers, the high point of which, according to the Legend of Homer theJ
Travelling Singer, was supposed to have been the imagined competition

of Homer with Hesiod.
For Melesigenes, who only later comes to be called Homer, the
situation of his initial success looked like this: In Cumae he sought out
"a place in the hall, where the old people sat and gossiped; he recited
to them the epics he had put together; and he delighted his listeners
in conversation and excited great admiration among the people. "16
Observing that his art pleased the people, he proposed to them "to
make the name of their city famous, if they would provide him with
his livelihood." But the promise of fame was not sufficient for that,
and the city council refused to provide for him. In Phocaea he ex-
perienced the other fate of the singer, being defrauded of his work,
and in fact precisely by the schoolmaster of the town offering to give
him free room and board in return for permission to put his successful
pieces into written form. The schoolmaster then decamped and dis-
appeared with them and tried out the stolen goods as his own, for
"much praise and good pay."
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Chapter 1
The reason given by the umpire in the contest with Hesiod for
putting the victor's wreath on Hesiod's head is not without charm:
"It was just and reasonable, he explained, that the victory should
belong to the man who calls us to agriculture and peaceful work,
rather than portraying \vars and battles." But in Aulis, only the king
could decide the contest that way, because it was contrary to the
decision implied in the favor of the public. The Greeks knew that the
crucial prerequisite for this story of the contest - that the two poets
should have lived at the same time-was missing; but to them the
gain in 'pregnance' that the confrontation in Aulis made possible and
that made it an often renewed and varied myth was sufficient to justify
the sacrifice of historiographical accuracy. 17
As long as writing is not available, stories are told; and the only
stories that survive are those than can be told again and again until
the time comes when they are written down. If the muses did what
Hesiod says they do, if they conferred fame, then many people em-
ulated not only the singer's art but also his proven selection of materials.
And here, the connection to myth's stories of the gods was already
established by the fact that rhapsodists were active professionally in
the great festivals and local cult celebrations, where, indeed, material
that was full of potential connections had presented itself as the occasion
[for the event in the first place]. The singer and his audience - neither
of them could afford to fall entirely out of step with the other.
When the honorariums became abundant and gave evidence of
increased fame, someone also turned up who had the ability and the
desire to write it down. That sounds like a delayed instance of 'econ-
omism' but is more nearly, to say it outright, a piece of Darwinism
in the realm of words. It is a process of the kind that produces in-
stitutions and rituals having a durability that is incomprehensible in
retrospect-things that have impressed and constrained men \vhile,
and although, scarcely anyone knew any longer where they came
from and what they meant. What they suggest is that they could not
have been invented, and, to that extent, also that their rational basis
cannot be given-because they have no need of a rational basis. Here
what is at stake is not only the call of da capo that every perfonnance
and recital seeks, as in the child's elementary petition, "Tell me the
story you told me yesterday!"-which Ineans that the story has been
found that can be retold every evening. For the singer does not offer
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only amusement and diversion; he also offers some of the assurance

and sanction [BekrOftigung] that will one day be called cosmos.
The topic of cosmogonies and theogonies enters the rhaposodist's
recital as a way of conjuring up the stability of the world, because
the gravest threats to it lie far back in time and the dominant god
has overcome his own dangers. He has tempered his rule and relin-
quished parts of his former arbitrariness. The muses celebrate the
stability of the world; their work is directed at calming people's sense
of the world. The subject of Hesiod's Theogony is not the primeval
times but rather the quick passage through them and the overcoming
of them in the later age of consolidation.
Consequently it is questionable whether Ernst Cassirer is right when
he says that the true character of the mythical "is first revealed when
it appears as the being of origins": "All the sanctity of mythical being
goes back ultimately to the sanctity of the origin. It does not adhere
immediately to the content of the given but to its coming into
being.... "18 The question is whether this 'original' quality is not iden-
tical with the contents and forms having passed the test of selection,
that is, with their durability over against time's processes of attrition.
Thus it is not as a result of the fact that a certain content is "thrust
back into temporal distance" and "situated in the depths of the past"
that it gets its mythical quality, but rather as a result of its stability
through time. Then Cassirer's proposition would be entirely correct,
that "time is the first original form of this spiritual justification" - but
it would have to be interpreted differently from the way Cassirer
interprets it. Otherwise, every "Ossian" that has not been unmasked
would share the same sanction deriving frorn mere temporal
transportatIon.
No disquiet is calmed by the fact that one can point to the pri-
mevalness of an event or the status of a content as original. On the
contrary, it is the proving of a content over a long period of time that
confers on it the quality that is attributed to the origins, to the immediate
relation of the primeval time to everything we can experience. Why
is that? It is because what is subject to time's wearing away and slurring
together can only have survived as a result of a capacity for impressing
itself strongly.19 Of course we credit and attribute to the beginning
what has - and has been able to preserve - the evident quality of
something that could not have been invented, and it is easy to overlook
the fact that what would still receive the title of originality can only
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Chapter 1
be a meager 'remainder' of what was there in the beginning. The

confusion between resistance to the effects of time and 'timelessness'
belongs among the almost metaphysical forms of carelessness: How
glad we would be to find that what has come down to and remained
for us is also what most deserved this, as the truth itself, the 'ancient
truth.' But it is only undated material of indefinite duration, and its
indifference to the expenditure of time, that parades under the title
of immortality.
It is only with these qualifications and reformulations that one could
agree with Cassirer when he sees the concept and effect of the mythical
in the absorption of questions of rational explanation: "The past itself
has no 'why': it is the why of things. What distinguishes mythical time
from historical time is that for mythical time there is an absolute past,
which neither requires nor is susceptible of any further explanation."
Almost all attempts at remythicization originate in a longing for the
compelling quality of those supposedly early discoveries of meaning,
but they were frustrated and will continue to be frustrated by the
unrepeatability of the conditions of their genesis. The belief that the
imagination must be able to accomplish in one stroke what the selection
operating through the long nights accomplished once and uniquely is
an illusion. This also holds when the late mythologist makes us believe
that the success of the archaic singer was the result of his being marked
out and equipped for the job by the god - and why couldn't what
happened once be repeated by thinkers or poets?
It is an illusion engendered by reason. Reason conceives the idea
of free variation within the horizon of the infinite possibilities that are
limited only by the condition of freedom from contradiction. When
it was announced from the walls during May 1968 in Paris that the
imagination should and now would come to power, it was immediately
clear to the late grandchildren of aesthetic Idealism that this guaranteed
that everything would become different and thus better. No one thought
they needed to ask-no one would have been permitted to ask-what
the imagination had to offer, what it had ever offered. We can con-
fidently invert Baudelaire's statement that the imagination created the
world, asserting that it could never have accomplished it. With the
coup de Inain of negation - which is a thoroughly contingent element
in logic, since a kind of thinking that would lack negation is at least
conceivable - all that reason has left open to itself, in each case where
sornething is given, is to think of it as nonexistent, as totally different.
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The example of the literary genre of 'utopia,' with its (reluctantly

admitted) poverty, demonstrates what the imagination's capacity to
pursue and break through the opening created by negation really
amounts to. In this field it is better to throw off the burden of proof
and to continue to 'owe' it. The author of Negative Dialectics b was
sufficiently intelligent to assign a positive value to this remaining in
debt-as the quality proper to the thinking that is 'owed' [des geschuldeten
Denkensl-by means of a paratheory: Imagination's poverty of accom-
plishment only establishes that in its historical position, under the
power of delusions, all that it can accomplish is the consolidation of
the existing state of things [des Bestehenden1. Therefore, the imagination
has to await the success of negation, rather than anticipating it. If only
the obstacle of the existing state of things is removed, then the pro-
jection of a new totality, by the process of the negation of the negation,
will proceed creatively after all. This has the fine irrefutability of
philosophical propositions that is so easily mistaken for their truth.
What we find empirically present-and not only in organic nature-
distinguishes itself, in contrast to the accomplishments of imagination,
by the wealth of unexpected material in its forms and modes of
behavior. No imagination could have invented what ethnology and
cultural anthropology have collected in the way of regulations of exis-
tence, world interpretations, forms of life, classifications, ornaments,
and insignia. All of this is the product of a process of selection that
has been at work for a long time, and in that respect, in this analogy
to the mechanism of evolution, approaches the stupendous variety
and the convincingness of the forms of nature itself. No aesthetic
theory would credit the imagination with having invented what has
been developed in human history in the way of institutions. The Nep-
tunism of selection always has a head start, in relation to the Vulcanismc
that Idealist aesthetics expects of the imagination, as a result of its
having shaped the latter's elementary possibilities. So the aesthetics
of the 'imitation of nature' was not all that mistaken when it included
the canon of the mythical materials in its normative realm: The ev-
identness of myth would have arisen 'in the manner of nature' and
would be equal to nature in the validity of its patterns.
Therefore, the symInetry between utopia and myth that is readily
claimed, on account of their powerful effects, does not exist. Myth
would still be an 'institution'd even if it had not arisen in the way
described by the model, deriving primarily from Egyptology, of the
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Chapter 1
narrative interpretation of rituals. The scandal of contingency that

every institution produces as soon as it is pressed (which is an everyday
sport) to demonstrate its legitimacy is increased by myth's refusal, if
not to continue to give reasons at every barrier where it is stopped
for questioning, at least to promise them. Consequently myth has
appeared to every historical formation of 'enlightenment' as more an
encurnbrance than a treasure. That is not such a matter of course as
it can seem to be under the impression produced by the Enlightenment's
agitation against myth as the exemplary compound of prejudices. For
with regard to the effort-which spans all of human history-to over-
come anxiety relating to what is unknown or even still unnamed,
myth and enlightenment are allies in a way that, while easy to under-
stand, is reluctantly admitted.
There is a reason for this reserve: Every economy of ideas for which
no rational foundation is given becomes suspect when it presents itself
as the demand for submission to something for which no rational
foundation can be given, and thus becomes the center of new anxieties.
It can be rational not to be rational to the utmost extent. But as a
means by which to express this circumstance, myth would be much
too risky, because its pragmatic implications cannot be unambiguous.
One would not be justified in 'setting it up,' if that were possible. On
the other hand, rationality is all too ready to engage in destruction
when it fails to recognize the rationality of things for which no rational
foundation is given, and believes it can afford to get carried away by
the process of establishing rational foundations. Descartes thought that
the best way to build cities rationally was to begin by razing the old
cities. Not even World War II yielded proof of this prospect for ra-
tionality. There are moments in which the outcomes of centuries and
millenniums are thoughtlessly sacrificed. What had been held fast and
passed on by a loyalty shielded from all reflection becomes a source
of offense and is gotten rid of. One does not need to be conservative,
however, to see that the demand for 'critical' destruction, and then
for a final rational foundation, leads to burdens of proof that, if they
were really accepted and undertaken as seriously as they are asserted
and demanded, would no longer leave room for what is supposed to
be gained, by this process, for the intelligent movement of existence.
Thus the selection of constants over long periods of tirne is, in fact,
a condition of the possibility of running the risks of "trial and error"
in parts of one's behavior.
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Part II
There is an extravagant attitude toward the establishment of rational

foundations that assumes from the beginning, or at least accepts, that
only those who are professionally commissioned or self-commissioned
to carry it out can afford to engage in it. If, however, enlightenment
allows thought to be legitimated only by the fact that everyone does
it himself and for himself, then thought is the only thing that has to
be excepted from the human capacity to delegate actions. From that,
in tum, it follows that something that everyone unavoidably has to
do himself and for himself simply must not be an 'endless task.' As
such, it stands in indissoluble contradiction to the meager finitude of
the life that the thinker-for-himself has disposition over.
Reason, as what cannot be delegated, must then reach some ac-
commodation with this fundamental condition of our existence: Here
is the breach through which certainties that must simply be accepted
make their entrance. This is unquestionably a serious gap in the pro-
tection provided by rationality; but if the only way to close it were to
give everyone's thinking-for-himself to a small avant-garde of profes-
sional 'thinkers-for-themselves on behalf of everyone' as a mandate,
then any danger would be worth confronting at this point in order
to avoid having to pay that fatal price. Philosophy has to keep this
antinomy of life and thought in mind in connection with all the self-
addressed demands for rationality that spring from its own womb.
A Darwinistic morphology cannot uncover in every detail the ac-
complishments of fossil and contemporary organisms in adapting to
long-disappeared environments. But the validity of the theory is not
affected by the fact that the original functionality, the selective ad-
vantage, of characteristics and features cannot be demonstrated in
every case. Even the unexplained strangeness of a resultant form
remains something that has proved itself over long periods of time,
that has been refined as the product of countless rounds of selection,
but also something that did not at least immediately lead into fatal
dead ends, that did not operate as a liability detracting from success
in life. Does myth fall once again and even more into disrepute if its
consolidation as a surviving figure, as an iconic constant, is explained
by a mechanism comparable to this one?
The application of the theory of evolution to man gave rise to doubts
from the beginning, not only on account of its establishment of affinities
\vith the animal realm but also especially on account of the possibility
of translating an explanatory theorem into a useful legitimating prin-
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Chapter 1
ciple for individual and social behavior, a principle such as is designated

with the catchword social Darwinism. The misconception that developed,
however, consists precisely in the narrow interpretation of the concept
of selection that restricts it to its performance in biological explanation.
One notices this immediately when one makes use of such an apparently
manageable expression as the development ifman. Its ambiguity is made
evident by the completely undisputed thesis that the factors that con-
ditioned the development that produced man were made superfluous
and nonfunctional precisely by their evolutionary success. The organic
systern resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes 'man' by
evading the pressure of that rnechanism by setting against it something
like a phantom body. This is the sphere of his culture, his institutions-
and also his rl1yths.
If we can speak of a development of human culture taking place
over millenniums, in doing so we imply that the conditions of selection
no longer reach and have an effect on man as a physical system to
the extent that he has learned to subject his artifacts and instruments,
instead of himself, to the process of adaptation. The world we live in
is a less Darwinistic world the more theory and technology are (ob-
jectively transposed) Darwinistic worlds. It is to these, rather than to
their producer, that the "survival of the fittest" applies. Human culture
is a front line of confrontation with nature - as well as of the obscuring
of nature's superior power, by the scenery of myth-that is pushed
out far ahead of the frontiers of the body, a front line at which the
action of selection on men's Physis and psyche [nature and soul] is in-
tercepted. Only a manner of thinking that has intentionally made itself
incapable of genetic and historiographical consideration of the past
can deny that by this criterion there has been, and there is, objective
progress. Even a decisionistice interpretation of institutions (in the widest
sense) reflects only the late and almost momentary finding of a con-
tingency that any effort on the part of rationality could supposedly
easily and quickly lift it above. Unhistoricalness is an opportunistic
way of easing our march, with disastrous consequences.
This is especially true of unhistoricalness in the disguised fonn of
an exclusively 'recent' history-since 1789, since 1848, since 1918, or
even since 1945. For history, whatever else it Inay still be, is also a
process of optimization. In order to recognize this fact, one does not
need to deny that there can be inconsistencies in the system of the
objectifications produced by selection, inconsistencies that ilnpair the
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Part II
overall result. They are due precisely to the isolation and rendering
autonomous of partial systems in the historical process; the history of
science and technology - both severed from the continuity of life as
a result of unavoidable specialization-is an example of this. Thus
conflicts arise between technological optimization and modes of be-
havior and and thought structures that have been stabilized by selection.
But even if the term optimization can never claim to be applicable
to a synchronic cross section as a whole, it does establish a definite
distribution of burdens of proof for what wants to give itself out as
rationality. At least arguments of the kind that assert that something
can no longer be accepted because it has already been accepted for
a very long time without examination do not have the rational plau-
sibility that is granted to them at times. What the heading "institutions"
covers is, above all, a distribution of burdens of proof. Where an
institution exists, the question of its rational foundation is not, of itself,
urgent, and the burden of proof always lies on the person who objects
to the arrangement the institution carries with it.
In the etiologial explanation of myth, which is so evident at first
sight and which always presupposes that myth is already secretly on
the road to science, the recognition of myth as an archaic accom-
plishment of reason has to be justified by its having initially and
especially given answers to questions, rather than having been the
implied rejection of those questions by means of storytelling. That this
in particular involves qualitative requirements of the highest order, if
it is supposed to have made people forget the process of questioning,
is no longer something one can see by looking at the outcome of the
process of selection. The mechanism of selection is precisely of such
a kind that, in its results, it does not provide the explanation for their
usefulness in life, but rather, so as to shield its function-by means
of the 'premodality' of matter-of-courseness-withholds that expla-
nation from one who is precisely not supposed to think about anything
except what is represented to him.
The fact that the choice of world interpretations, the decision between
forms of life, has already been accomplished is what constitutes the
circumstance of having a history. It is not only on account of its
requirement of written documents and sources that historiography
comes late in human development. When historiography begins, the
proceedings in regard to elementary commitments are already con-
cluded, the deadlines for lodging objections have passed, the papers
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Chapter 1
have been shelved. The burden of proof lies on the person who demands
that the proceedings be reopened-on, for example, the Milesian
protophilosopher of the first half of the sixth century B.C. with his
dictum that everything was full of gods, if that was supposed to mean
that everything was sufficiently full, without being satisfying. One,
then, for whom this had become a source of boredom and discomfort
had to argue for the visionary effort of a theory asserting that, instead
of that multiplicity, everything was a unity by virtue of having arisen
from the single element which up until that time had been given the
name of Oceanus. He who asserted or accepted this did not yet need
to know what a chain reaction of the production of theories he would
set in motion, in the late phase of which one could finally say, modifying
his dictum, that now everything was full of theories. Of course, theories
have a process of succession and success that is different from the
process of the development of pregnance, though with his concept of
the "paradigm switch" Thomas S. Kuhn has transfen-ed the psycho-
logical discovery of the "Gestalt switch" to the history of theories and
thus provided the latter with an (actively disputed) analogy to the
process by which dynasties succeed one another in myth.
Cassirer, too, developed the concept of a "symbolic form" from
sources in Gestalt psychology into a system of categories that makes
it possible to understand myth as a form of perception and also as a
form of thought and of life. The approach to the authentic compre-
hension of mythical perception is by way of the phenomenon of
expression, or, more precisely, by way of the "primacy of expression-
perception over thing-perception. "20 While thing-perception tends to-
ward unambiguousness, and in that respect prepares the way for the
theoretical attitude, the reality of expression involves the ambiguity
(Vieldeuligkeil, literally, "multiple meaning") of one and the same thing
over time, that is, the same "Gestalt switch" by means of which Kuhn
tries to comprehend the change of paradigms. For Cassirer this is what
is presupposed by the mythical category of metamorphosis: "Every
shape can metamorphose into another; anything can come fronl any-
thing." But since the face that the world exhibits in each case depends
on the affective state of the person to whom it exhibits itself, it is
impossible to interest oneself in it intersubjectively except in the Inodc
of communicated subjectivity, that is, through storytelling. Here Cas-
sirer's theory stops short of the most ilTIportant step, \vhich is to tell
us how this fundamental form of subjectivity nevertheless attains its
Part II
specific acceptance in history. What can be granted to myth is certainly

neither theoretical nor pre scientific objectivity, but it is nevertheless
an intersubjective 'communicability' that stands, in its form, incom-
parably closer to the kind of acceptance that goes with objectivity than
to any affectively tinged experience of expression like that typified
by amazement at a 'momentary god. 'f What Cassirer and others have
overlooked while demanding a theory of the origin of myth is the
circumstance that the entire stock of mythical materials and models
that has been handed down to us has passed through the agency of
reception, has been 'optimized' by its mechanism of selection.
The reason Cassirer was not interested in the question of the re-
ception of myth, but exclusively in that of its origin and its quality as
an origin, is precisely that he considered it from the point of view of
the terminus ad quem [limit toward which the process is directed]. As
a way of ordering the world of experience that, while in principle it
is equal in status to science and art and cannot be deprived of its
value by them, nevertheless tends toward them historically, myth is
the defining characteristic of an epoch to which the philosophy of
history has to ascribe a preliminary status. Its origin only betrays what
first becomes possible when it is suspended. In spite of all the affir-
mations of the autonomous quality of this symbolic system of forms,
it remains, for Cassirer, something that has been overcome - overcome,
to be sure, in that it itself points to the experience and the achievement
of order in which its surrender of its position, together with the con-
clusion of history itself, would have to be found. There is a final system
of symbolic forms; on this assumption any recurrence of mythical
'categories' is out of the question, or to be regarded as an aesthetic
anachronism. 21 My opinion, in contrast to this, is that in order to
perceive myth's genuine quality as an accomplishment one would have
to desribe it from the point of view of its terminus a quo [limit away
from which the process is directed]. Removal away from, not approach
toward, then becomes the criterion employed in the analysis of its
function. It would be not only, and perhaps not even, a "symbolic
form" but above all a 'form as such,' by which to define the undefined.
This abstract -sounding formula is meant to be understood anthro-
pologically, not epistemologically. Understood in terms of its origin,
'form' is a means of self-preservation and stability in the world. Once
he has emerged from the regularity of a condition in which his behavior
was determined by his environment, the hominid creature has to deal
with the failure of the indicators and determinants of his behavior,
with the indeterminacy of what the constituent parts of his reality
'mean'g for him. He begins to set up 'significances' [Bedeutsamkeitenl
over against the disappearance of strict meanings [Bedeutungenl. It may
be that discovering and attending to the daily and yearly recurrence
of the same was the earliest access that man had to a reliability
surrounding him, contrary to the appearance of reality as a sheer
superior power. On the other hand there is the view that sees phonetic/
linguistic exclamations in response to uncanny and uncomfortable
phenomena as the source, perhaps still accessible through etymology,
of the names of gods. It may not be important to decide between
approaches that focus more on ecstatic aspects and others that focus
on normalization-what is important, it seems to me, is that even the
most trifling invention [or "discovery": Erfindungl required acceptance,
to avoid being immediately annihilated again. 22
If reliability can be found [gefundenl in repetition, it can also be
invented [eifundenl in the form of repeatability. Even if the kind of
experience that is associated with theory cannot be founded on the
causal interpretation of repetition, still this does not by any means
prevent it from being the case that, genetically, repetition and the
production of repeatable material accomplished the same thing. Every
name that becomes accepted, every netvvork of names as a result of
which their accidental character seems to be suspended, and every
story that presents the bearers of these names as endowed with char-
acteristics enriches definiteness over against the background of in-
definiteness. To know on whom one has to depend is always a source
of security in one's conduct, a source that is not without advantage
for life, and the systems of which can hardly be less old than ITIan
himself, if we have to proceed from the assulnption that his origin
was in a loss of biological security.
As for the reception of names it is worth considering a note that
Kant made in connection with his Anthropologie, a note that-\vithout
engaging in the realism of names that is treated with irony in Plato's
Cratylus, and also without language mysticisITI - admits that a name
may have a specific quality: "I seek, first of all, what lies behind the
giving of names. For a new word does not immediately gain acceptance,
unless it is very apt. "23 The ilTIportance of the apt giving of names
can be verified from the fact that in the systematic field of technical
innovations it son1etilnes fails entirely to take place, in spite of a
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Part II
pressing need and the most widespread experience of the lack: Lieber
Fernsehzuschauer [dear TV viewed still remains a painful embarrassment,
whereas Tonband [tape] has successfully emerged from the long-winded
Magnetophonband [magnetic recording tape].
The question of what reason will accomplish in relation to man's
self-preservation has hardly been decided yet. To the extent that it
presents itself as the agency that establishes things rationally, it is this
even before any of its claims have been fulfilled, above all as the
authority that revokes things. As such an authority, philosophy em-
bodied a break with myth. It will not be possible to maintain that this
break was successful from the beginning or even in its early stages.
The proposition that everything is rnade of water is indeed different,
but that does not yet make it better than the proposition that everything
rests on Oceanus. What everything is made of is still an open question,
the only difference being that it is now of interest only in the form
of an endlessly subdivided list of questions. Fundamentally, philosophy's
break with myth took on the historical interest that it has today only
after it had made it possible to recognize a triumph, delayed for
millenniums, of the supposedly antithetical principle-and it took on
that interest because it was that interest. The reason that defines an
object for itself to study makes itself into the principle of the reason
that it defines: Logos comes into the world through the break with
myth. The significance of the fact that reason would have to contradict
itself, once more, in order to free itself from what contradicts it, has
not been sufficiently appreciated.
One can still perceive the full extent of Kant's astonishment at his
observation when he writes with regard to "The Discipline of Pure
Reason"-summing up the whole first Critique-"But that reason,
whose proper duty it is to prescribe a discipline for all other endeavors,
should itself stand in need of such discipline may indeed seem strange;
and it has, in fact, hitherto avoided this humiliation, only because, in
view of its stately guise and established standing, nobody could lightly
come to suspect it of an idle game .... "h That this was seen as having
befallen old reason at such a late date once again reveals the distortion
of our temporal perspective; but it also makes questionable a concept
of reason that can afford always to support itself only by the final
contradiction of everything that went before it.
Kant's requirement that reason stay within the horizon of experience
stands under the principle - discovered with the aid of the Scholastic
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Chapter 1
concept of the veritas ontologica [ontological truth] that is proper to God,

and carried over to man by the modem age - that the truth of a thing
is only accessible to him who made it, and only to the extent that he
made it. Under the premises of a mechanistic view of the world, that
is perfectly clear: The inventor of a mechanism is plainly unrivaled
as theorist of that mechanism. But does that hold for every kind of
authorship? Is truth about history gained in such a way that one need
only find out the intention and the comprehension belonging to the
person who made it or at least helped to make it? It is with this kind
of counterquestion that the position that carries the title of "herme-
neutics" and contradicts that modem principle of truth makes its
entrance, the position that ascribes to creative authenticity a potentiality
that was not (or would not be) accessible and intelligible to any author,
but was in fact (or would be) predominantly unrecognized and missed
by authors, and is only disclosed and unfolded by the work of reception,
by criticism and interpretation. Here the paradox of Romanticism is
very close by, in which only the 'critic' is empowered to deal with the
meaning and truth of the work, being assigned to the blind creator
as his clear-sighted perfecter.
Thus there comes into being, one level below the genius, a new
aesthetic elite of criticism and interpretation. On closer inspection, this
is not the public that 'receives' the work at all, but rather a sort of
integrative agent in the production of the 'work,' of whatever type it
may be. It is governed by the dictum of Matteo Mattesilano, "Semper
mens est potentior quam sint verba" [The mind is always more potent
than the wordsl- the guiding principle of an extensive interpretation
ofla\v. i But the illusion that one could write the history of the reception
of a work [its Rezeptionsgeschichtel by questioning the author's critics,
instead of investigating his intentions, never actually gets at the real
or supposed addressee of the work, the audience, and even if it does
perhaps get at the audience's 'judgments of taste,' it still doesn't reach
as far as what was expected of the audience as the effect of the \vork:
its experience, or even its enjoyment.
In the end all that we have as an index of the \\lork's 'historical
influence' ['Wirkungsgeschichte'] is its sheer survival, the simple fact that
it did not perish along with the mass of what has been forgotten. It
is not a devaluation of the function of criticism when one suggests a
comparison, for a particular book or theater season, bet\veen the
elevations and condemnations handed out by the reviewers and the
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Part II
final statistical results in terms of performances and editions. Such a

suggestion is only a warning intended to put a damper on the ex-
travagant evaluation of histories of influence [Wirkungsgeschichtenl as
successful or possible means of access to the experiential side.
Mythology offers the unique advantage that one only has to deal
with the slender stock of what has survived. We cannot get access to,
and question, the people who made it up any more than we can
question the possible specialists, whom I carefully do not call critics
because they may also have been competing rhapsodists, go-betweens,
organizers of cult festivals, and other responsible people. Jauss, building
on the work of Vinaver and Rychner, has been able to depart from
the categories of classical and Romantic aesthetics in relation to the
old Romance epic precisely in view of the fact that oral delivery had
still not ceased to play a part in the formation of the works as they
are accessible to us and that one can speak of a "fluid transmission"
of this kind of orally delivered poetry with elements of improvisation.
Jauss has shown for the Roman de Renart that "the core of the cycle,
the fable of the day the lion held court, was retold differently no less
than eight times." This strikes him as a "remarkable phenomenon,"
one that a positivistic mode of investigation would not be able to
account for except by assuming a sequence of "corrupt variants" of
an inaccessible original. J auss considers the medieval audience, for
which these variations could present themselves as a "sequence of
continuations" that "were always able to develop a new element of
excitement, in spite of continual imitation. "24 In contrast to what we
have to assume in relation to the early Greek epic before it entered
the phase in which it was written down, in the medieval epic the
culture of writing has a strong influence on the process of variation
and selection, giving an accidental character to the fixing of the variants
that have no original and concealing the reversal of the relation between
theme and variations that is caused by the continual influence of
people's predilections for a da capo.
As a result of the writing down that 'accompanies' the process of
reception, the theoretician of the medieval epic is confronted by a
different kind of configuration of source materials. He does not have
to merely conjecture what was decided as a result of forgetting and
survival, nor does he have to regard the outcome, as the mythologist
does, as the summing up of unknown alternatives that creativity
produced.
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Chapter 1
Translator's Notes
a. The tenn archaic should be understood here in its original Greek sense as signifYing association
with origins or beginnings.
b. T. W. Adorno.
c. Vulcanism and Neptunism were competing geological theories in the latter part of the
eighteenth century, Vulcanism asserting the volcanic, or igneous, origin of rocks, and Neptunism
asserting that they originated in the oceans. Vulcanism, then, can suggest convulsive processes
requiring relatively little time in comparison to Neptunism's long-tenn processes of sedimentation.
d. Institution, here and on subsequent pages, is used in a sense that clearly relates to the one
introduced by Arnold Gehlen in his Urmensch und Spatkultur (Bonn: Athenaum, 1956). For
Gehlen, institutions are the shared patterns of perception and behavior that man erects to
take the place of instincts (with which, in comparison to other animals, he is very poorly
equipped) in guiding his actions.
e. Dnisionismus, "decisionism," a tenn coined by Carl Schmitt, is now commonly used to refer
to an attitude that emphasizes the element of sheer decision in human affairs that cannot (in
practice, at least) be entirely eliminated in favor of rational argument. Arnold Gehlen, who
introduced the 'anthropological' concept of institution that is being used here (see note d), has
been described as a decisionist because his institutions are (in part, at least) simply accepted,
without ever being completely justified on rational grounds. Blumenberg appears to be saying
here that a "decisionistic" interpretation of institutions underestimates the objective progress
that they can represent.
( The concept of "momentary gods" that are genetically prior to special, functional, and finally
personal gods was introduced by Hermann Usener in his Go'Uernamen (Bonn, 1896). Cassirer
was very interested in Usener's theory.
g. "Mean" here is bedeuten, which besides being defined as "to mean" or "to signifY" can also
mean "to direct," "to enjoin," "to advise," in line with deutm, "to point." Thus Bedeutungell,
in one sense, were "indicators" of appropriate behavior.
h. Critique of Pure Reason A 710, B 738, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan; New
York: St. Martin's, 1929), p. 575 (translation slightly revised).
i. Matteo Mattesilano was a jurist in Bologna circa 1435, a "postglossator," and the author of
De interpretatiolle legis extensivQ (Venice, 1557). His maxim, given here, is cited by (for example)
Josef Esser, "Die Interpretation im Recht," Studium Generale 7 (I954): 377.
2
Fundamental Myths and Art
Myths
Es sind auch Teufel, doch verkappt.

-Mephistopheles, explaining angels to devils [Goethe, Faust II, line
11696]
[They are devils too, but in disguise.]
Attempts have repeatedly been made to reduce the diverse myths of

our culture circle and of others to a fundamental myth [Grundmythos]
and then to establish the latter as the 'radical' that underlies unfoldings
and enrichments. This procedure is based on the assumption that the
invariant kernels of myth would also have to lead one to its original
condition. The capacity for marginal variation would then result from
a surrounding field of later accumulated foreign bodies and residues
of amalgamation. But the radical myth does not have to be the initial
myth. That would be a supplementary assumption that can only have
a lively attraction for someone who does not subscribe to the assumption
that what interests us is not the original myth at all. On the contrary,
the myth that is varied and transformed by its receptions, in the forms
in which it is related to (and has the power of being related to) history,
deserves to be made a subject of study if only because such a study
also takes in the historical situations and needs that were affected by
the myth and were disposed to 'work' on it.
If it is supposed to be possible to allow talk of a fundamental myth
without giving it out as the original myth, its condensation and con-
solidation must be a diachronic process, a sort of testing of what could
no longer be dispensed with in a unit myth, both in identifying it and
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Chapter 2
in laying claim to what it accomplishes as an image. The more successful

the process of solidification, the more hard-wearing its result.
The fundamental myth is not what was pre-given, but rather what
rernains visible in the end, what was able to satisfy the receptions and
expectations. We are familiar with the purely literary phenomenon
that it is precisely in the unit myths that are most 'successful,' his-
torically, that daring and violent amendments and twistings find their
special provocation. Could Kafka or Gide have managed, in their
determined modifications of mythical themes, to forgo the Prometheus
myth? Can we imagine it having vanished from our store of tradition
at some time or other? The easy and not unjustifiable answer will be:
"Inconceivable." The same is true for a fundamental myth like that
of the prohibition against turning around to see that what was promised
with certainty has also certainly occurred, like Orpheus and Lot's wife.
We can understand immediately, in terms of anthropology, what fills
the prohibition against turning around with inexhaustible significance:
As humans our frontal optics make us creatures with a lot of 'back,'
who have to live under the condition that a large part of reality lies
behind us and is something that we have to leave behind us.
Prometheus and Orpheus - these names make clear, at the same
time, that it has to be a mistake to measure and explain the significance
of a fundamental myth by the fact that it was supposed to give answers
to questions. Nevertheless, a fundamental myth will have to be assessed
in terms of the scope of its accomplishment: being radical, it becomes
capable of being total. But that only means that it carries with it the
suggestion that owing to it and in it nothing is left unsaid. What is
not said is a different category from what is not asked. What totality
means here is something that we know at all only since it \vas re-
nounced, and had to be renounced, so that we could have scientific
knowledge.
Science depends on the abandonment of the claim to totality. There
is so much talk of a 'world concept' in philosophy precisely because
philosophy cannot have a world concept-it can never have more
than an idea of something that must continue to be \vithheld from it
because it is not able to deny itself the norm of theoretical knowledge.
It is frivolous to suppose that it might have to thro\v off this very
norm in favor of a world concept of whatever kind, or that it rnay
even have done so in one case or another. That is playing with pos-
sibilities that do not exist-a subtle kind of self-important dealing \vith
options that are not open. The renouncing of totality in favor of science
is just as final as the renouncing of the kind of truth that people once
thought they could expect from totality, or as the renouncing of specific
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Part II
"why" questions, or, finally, as the renouncirig of the 'intuitive' character

of knowledge [Verzicht au] Anschaulichkeit]. However, we are operating
here in the area of things that cannot be renounced, things that make
themselves noticeable in the surrogates that they force into existence.
The characteristics of a fundamental myth can be seen from attempts
to imitate the qualities of myth with the means of art. Here, in the
'art myth' too, it never seems to be pure imagination that is at work,
but rather the elaboration of elementary fundamental patterns. If-
to clarify this by the example of Plato's myths-men are in any case
thought of as emerging from the earth, as the Greeks largely did think
of them, t.hen the imaginative representation of their cultivation up
to their highest potential, in the simile of the cave, is supported by
this basic idea, as an extension built into the 'fundamental myth' that
can be schematized as 'emergence from the earth into the light.' Here
there is a convergence between 'fundamental myth' and absolute
metaphor. 1
After Plato I daresay only Nietzsche tried to devise elementary
myths that were thought out carefully as theory, and employed them
as an instrument of philosophy. But Nietzsche works just as much
with daring variants of sanctioned myths. He knew what he expected
and wanted to demand of a reader who had been made familiar,
from earliest childhood onward, with configurations like that of the
biblical Paradise, where the tempter had the form of the snake, the
prohibition had to do with a harmless fruit, and God, walking in the
garden, was friendliness itself, permitting almost everything and for-
bidding only one thing-a figure whose generosity seemed to be
glorified by the contrast of its later transformation into the angry zeal
of a lawgiver who was to prohibit almost everything and leave only
a few things in the permitted category. When Nietzsche, in his late
retrospect on Beyond Good and Evil in Ecce Homo (1888), makes the myth
of Paradise into a scandal, at the same time he makes it more obvious
than many allegorical interpreters before him had done that it contains
a fundamental myth of a high order.
In doing this Nietzsche announces himself as one who is speaking
theologically, when he suggests that to refer to this myth is to "speak
theologically," which is something he "rarely" does. The criterion of
leaving nothing unsaid says nothing either for or against this specific
description; it is the method of 'reoccupying' a given configuration
that qualifies it as mythical.
Nietzsche says that it was God himself "who at the end of his days'
work lay down as a serpent under the tree of knowledge: thus he
recuperated from being God .... " [Ellipsis in original.] As a snake he
not only takes a rest after his work of creation, he makes himself into
the principle of evil. One would have no doubt that, following the
Gnostic model, he is merely presenting himself as the god of this
world. But Nietzsche has an entirely different, original intention in the
three sentences, designated as elliptical, of his myth: The God who is
recuperating from being himself sees, in the paradisaic state of his
creation, temptation itself. It is the temptation of stationary finality
and completeness. The self-enjoyment of the seventh day turns into
satiety with the good that he has made, because he sees that is cannot
have any future, any history. Paradise is the negation of history, the
epitome of a god's boredom. Thus God becomes the devil, in order
to propel his work toward, not the pleasant outcome of paradisaic
harmlessness, but the dramatic catastrophe of world history: "He had
made everything too beautiful. ... The devil is merely the leisure of
God on that seventh day."2 That (for the benefit of those who vvould
rather not look it up) is the entire text of the myth inversion. It is
evident that the "theological" attitude is meant ironically.
One spoils something for oneself when one sets out to skim assertions
from the multiple meaning of this compact myth. But this cannot be
avoided if one wants to demonstrate how the myth satisfies the criterion
of totality by leaving nothing unsaid. The myth allows one to see that
there is nothing more there to say and there will never be more to
say - something that no theory can dare to assert. The temptation in
Paradise was the device adopted by a God who wanted to give his
work the quality of history, who did not want the question of man
to come to a halt immediately but instead wanted it to take its course
through the great detour to the superman. This God did not regret
ha ving created, but he did regret the extent of a perfection that as
'Paradise' already had to be the end, the epitome of every satisfaction.
Sin was a trick, and the old antithesis of good and evil was only a
deception from the very beginning, in Paradise-the trap in \vhich
man was to be caught because he believed that this was the secret
that God was withholding from him. But God's true secret is that the
good bores him, even the good that he himself is. His day of leisure
is his simulation of his absence (sirnulated, since he does after all lie
under the tree of knowledge as the snake), as a means of driving man,
by Ineans of prohibition and promise (both means deriving fi'om the
saIne source), into his world history.
This art myth embodies Nietzsche's whole suspicion that Descartes's
geniUS malignus [malicious spirit] may be the ultimate authority. The
threat to the subject at the beginning of the Inodern age, a threat
that is only superficially dealt with, could not have been eliminated
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Part II
by any argument, and could only be overcome by means of a final

break with the ideal of truth. In the figure of the biblical God of
Creation there remains, in the end, no good will toward man; that is
why this God, in the metamorphosis of the snake, makes him think
that it is through temptation administered by God's adversary that
he loses his place in Paradise. God does not admit to man that this
is God's own secret wish, resulting from his boredom with the mode
of domestication called Paradise. It is a total myth of cynicism. It
speaks of the metaphysical tyranny that can only be escaped by one
who makes good and evil and true and false matters of absolute
indifference for himself- the tyranny that demands the superman,
because only the superman can escape it. The myth has said everything
that there was to be said-from Nietzsche's point of view-about the
world, man, and history. In its three sentences, it leaves nothing unsaid.
If one considers the full extent of the malice with which Nietzsche
here pretends to speak as a theologian [Theologe], although of course
he knows very well what a mythmaker [Mythologel is, it is increased
by the elimination of the slightest hint of dualism from the biblical
personnel: God himself, still very much the Creator and the friendly
master of the garden, takes on the role of the diabolos, the mischief-
maker. He is the one in all. But then one can't help noticing that he
makes use not only of tricks but also, precisely in order to be able to
be the one in all, of the faculty of transformation. By taking on the
form of the snake, he shows himself to be a God of metamorphoses.
From our perspective, the mythical category of metamorphosis car-
ries the odium of a reduced level of seriousness. Christian dogmatics
opposed the God of the Incarnation, who is supposed to have identified
himself definitively with the nature and fate of man, to the episodic
character of metamorphosis. The critical experience from which Euro-
pean postantiquity learned what constitutes the 'seriousness' of realism
was the dogma of the Incarnation. The posing of a question like the
Cartesian one-whether the world really is, in itself, what it seems to
us to be, and what guarantees there can be of this-is something that
one can understand, as a problem of certainty that penetrates the
whole epoch, only if one can presuppose what was gained as a con-
ceptual capacity through the (similarly epoch-long) experience of
dogma. In any case it is part of the modem age's consciousness of
itself that it is always 'getting serious' anew with new (theoretical,
practical, aesthetic) realisms. Regarding the mythical gods, who he
says only smile in response to the words time, life, and death, the poet
says finally, "There is only one word they listen to with seriousness:
/ Transformation."3
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Chapter 2
Hans Jonas applied the concept of a "fundamental myth," with a

methodical intention that diverges from that of mythology as a de-
partment of the history of religion [Religionswissenschajtl, to Gnosticism
as a spiritual formation of late antiquity. What mattered to him here
was not to dissect out the common and irreducible characteristics of
a multiplicity of Gnostic myths, as a paradigmatic myth, nor was it
to demonstrate the original unity of what was later a multiplicity.
What he calls the "autogenous, unitary, fundamental myth" is the
mode of representation - which cannot be gone beyond and does not
take this concrete form by mere chance-of the self-conception of
this epoch, which he calls the Gnostic epoch. The fundamental myth
is a transcendental factor in history, arrived at by inference: "The
sought -for synthetic principle of the manifold of mythical objectifi-
cations in the realm of Gnostic interpretation."4
The fundamental myth, then, as Jonas conceives of it, is not a matter
of fact that is found in the history of literature. As a structural schema
for such facts and examples, that is, for the myths or quasi-mythical
constructs that can actually be shown to exist, it is a "dynamic principle
of the establishment of meaning." Here it is not of primary importance
that because of the reliance of Hans Jonas's work on Gnosticism on
Heidegger's existential analytic, it interprets the mythical ground plan
as a typically "existential" self-interpretation of historical Dasein, so
that what presents itself as an external proceeding that is narratable,
part of the world, and filled with forms is only a projection of the
way historically living man understands himself in his "existence."
Now, Jonas's approach, which was brilliantly confirmed by the ex-
tensive Gnostic finds after 1945, has occasionally been extended, as
a philosophy of history, into the assertion that it must be possible to
construct a findamental myth for every epoch, even if no distinctive
mythical material is present there, as it is in Gnosticism. This idea
may be tempting, but it fails to recognize the exceptional disposition
toward nlyth that is built into Gnostic dualism. For stories can be told
here, in particular, specifically because two primeval powers, two
metaphysical camps, oppose one another with every kind of stratagem
and trick, and the history of man is only a sort of indicator of the
changes in the distribution of power, back and forth, of the partial
successes, turning points, and attacks. The dualistic model is pregnant
with myth. It produces stories in the same way that modem dualistic
remythicizing efforts instead retrospectively produce history as some-
thing interpreted by them: The current state of the world at any given
time is always the expected cross section of the total process of the
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battle of the powers that determine reality. 'Only in this way can history
be narrated as a story, in which good and evil have their representatives.
In the strict sense, a dualistic beginning of history as a whole would
have to make impossible any unambiguous end, because one would
always have to reckon with the possibility of repetition; and that would
arouse more concern about salvation than it allayed. In fact Gnostic
dualism, like every other, is absolute only in relation to the beginning
and its consequences, but not in relation to the end and its definitiveness.
The negative principle is not, indeed, annihilated, but it is certainly
driven to resignation by having its prey wrested from it. What de-
termines the outcome is not a shift in the distribution of power but
rather the superiority of one side in cunning.
That is why every relapse into Gnosticism contains the license,
prized by its partisans, of allowing any means in pursuit of the final
goal. One can then speak of strategies, also of double strategies, and
the unconcern with respect to the means employed excludes any
alternatives with respect to the ends, the realization of which is in-
dispensable in order to justify those who serve them. Part of this is
the circumstance that the goals become evident only to the extent
that the intermediate process reaches or can reach the worst, the
unbearable state, so that in some thoroughgoing groups the repertory
of Gnosticism includes the augmentation of what is commonly called
sin, as a way of forcing the state of the world rapidly to the point
where it becomes metaphysically indefensible, the extreme provocation
of the opposite principle. Together with this, one could hold that moral
righteousness and faithfulness to the law could not yet be the quality
that justifies an individual before the good, 'foreign' god.
The advantage of Gnosticism was that it did not need to involve
man, overall, more than moderately in the great, decisive cosmic-
metaphysical events: They did occur on his behalf, but not through him.
He had to try to gain a share in them, but did not have to supply a
subject to undergo them.
However random the figures, the steps, the entanglements, and the
deceptions may be, the Gnostic myth tends, contrary to its dualistic
general premise, toward a decisive event by which everything that
may have been contrived in order to bring it about is justified. In this
decisive event the last assumptions of the existence of opposing powers
of equal rank disappear; otherwise the process would have to be
endless and every certainty arrived at would only be an episode. This
makes it evident that an absolute dualism, like the Manichaean one,
cannot have been in the interest of Gnosticism as a doctrine of 'sal-
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Chapter 2
vation.' A more suitable myth is one that includes the 'genesis' of the
dualistic division.
The hypothesis of a fundamental myth is forced on us by the pro-
fusion of mythical variants and names and of the hypotactic and
paratactic constructions of Gnostic systems, which have the effect of
parodies of Hesiod's Theogony. If one adopts the hypothesis that all of
this is the imaginative representation of the historical life-style associated
with a conception of oneself and the world that is detaching itself
from the ancient world and is at variance with that world's value
premises, then one sees in its relationship to what went before it the
necessity of allusion to ancient myths and the inevitable challenge to
say all of this again in a way that is 'sounder' and more capable of
defense. Then one can anticipate the way the dogma of the Church
will form itself over against its Gnostic opponent but will be viable in
the world only because it acknowledges the problems raised by Gnos-
ticism. As such, the Church's dogma is to a large extent the form in
which the Gnostic opposition to the ancient world survives, institu-
tionalized with means provided by the ancient world.
If one wishes, both methodically and substantively, to keep open
the possibility that other epochs could also have what for them is the
"effective basic constitution of historical existence itself' laid out in a
fundamental myth, by means of which they are able to provide them-
selves with their "intentional (mythical or other) objectifications in
image worlds," this does not, in itself, exclude other systems of expres-
sion and assertion. In the case of Gnosticism, however, an exclusiveness
of this kind does have to be maintained. The fundamental myth does
not prescribe the secondary material that will be propagated. It co-
ordinates it with its functions in the circumstantiality of salvation's
path through the cosmos. Abstract elements appear as hypostases,
emanations, or eons, as quasi figures. Harnack resisted the classification
of Marcion as a Gnostic; he had not taken part in the speculation
about eons and emanations, but instead had restricted himself to the
doctrine of two gods. But that analysis misses the decisive characteristics.
The speculative redundancies only constitute the free space of the
Gnostic imagination; functionally, though, they also make up what is
suggested by arbitrariness in the defonnation of the ancient COSInos,
and thus by its lack of binding force.
At the same time, with the liberality of this elaboration of systelns,
the scandal is brewing that Inakes the ascendancy of the dogmatic
condemnation of it inevitable, however little this could already be
visible at the time of Marcion's excomInunication in Rome in A.D.
144. For here too, as with other processes of dogmatization, one finds
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in practice that concepts always press themselves into the foreground

when the multiplicity of schools and sects, and thus of image worlds,
cults, and personifications, presses toward a higher level of exclusive
definition, toward the competitiveness of the contents by which they
are differentiated. Medieval Scholasticism was to go so far on this path
that it became a caricature of itself and made its name a term of
abuse.
From the relation between the imagination and conceptual thought
that can be gathered from the defeat of Gnosticism by the Church,
it would be easy to infer that the supposed vigor that generates images
is always simply an expression of incompetence in relation to concepts.
It would then only be a preliminary stage of the world-historical work
of conceptualitya itself, and the latter would thus be the fulfillment of
the intention that holds sway in names and images and rituals. That
is not only a hermeneutic mistake but an interpretation that has already
had an effect in history.
The separation from Gnosticism gives those who are engaged in
the process of the formation of dogma one of the two chief means
by which they can comprehend what they are doing. They can present
metaphor and simile as preparing the way for the conceptual defi-
niteness that was first able to find its image-free language in the creeds
and the decisions of the Church councils. This should be compared
to Marcion's statement that the parable form is the mode of speech
proper to the proclamation of the "foreign god." In declaring this he
had, admittedly, created the difficulty for his interpreter that he had
invalidated, of all things, the parable of the prodigal son from the
Gospel according to Luke, the parable of which Harnack finally es-
tablished that in the texts of the synoptic Gospels it alone was "new
and unique," that is, not derivable from Hellenistic precedent. But in
his sole Gospel-falsely attributed, he said, to Luke, but actually be-
longing to Paul- Marcion could not tolerate this unique passage because
it spoke of homecoming from foreign parts, whereas the Gnostic had
to find his true home in a foreign land. One sees - and that is why
this had to be cited here - how Marcion seeks to remain entirely within
the simile, and how he scorns evading the issue by means of allegorical
interpretation, even as a way of saving a piece of evidence of the
uniqueness of what he regards as the primary document.
The second instrument by which the process of the formation of
dogma is comprehended by those engaged in it is by understanding
assertions exclusively as answers to questions, the stock of which is
regarded as, as it were, an ideal cosmos. Then the propositions of
ancient philosophy already had to contain answers that, while (of
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Chapter 2
course) inadequate, were nevertheless unambiguously related to this

stock of questions. The language of new answers inevitably had to be
related to the explication-already accomplished in advance-of the
questions. Not only does the process of the formation of dogma replace
the stories, it also implies their rejection, because stories cannot be
validated as answers to questions - and also because their binding
force had to be questionable, and unsuited to serve as the terms,
submission to which was implied in faith.
Thus the dogmatization of Christian theology, out of fear of contact
with myth's orientation by means of images, produced a language
different from the biblical one. Its consistency-consistency being the
primary value in a structure of dogma-was achieved through the
taking over, which was not completed until the High Middle Ages, of
ancient metaphysics. This 'reception' made it possible to suggest with
confidence that in the teachings of the Church answers had been given
to man's permanent fundamental questions and that the Gnostic hy-
pertrophy represented only a muddled and failed attempt at the same
thing-it did not, one could say, understand the questions, so as to
be able to give the answers.
Thornton Wilder reported that the last words of his friend Gertrude
Stein, on her deathbed, were, first, "What is the answer?" and then,
after a period of silence, "What is the question?" This concentration
into an individual case reflects the historical phenomenon that we
have to deal with again and again and that we uncover with such
difficulty. Just as the Enlightenment thinkers suggested that myths
were nothing but inadequate answers to the pressing questions of
human curiosity about nature, to the early Christian self-interpretation
the questions about the story of the soul and its salvation had also
appeared as 'given' and permanent. That made it possible to demand
that they should be answered just as precisely as they were supposed
to have been posed.
This is precisely the reverse of what actually occurs in history. The
questions emerge only when the accomplished products of the imag-
ination and assertions come under the pressure of the demand that
they be associated with something to which response, corroboration,
approval, or advice is being addressed. Dogma's late discovery of
Original Sin crystallized out, as the question that had been absorbed
in it, what it actually was that redemption had to redeem people from.
The whole development of personal eschatology also appears to be
like this, as though it were the answer to the question of the fate of
the individual soul and of the justice governing that fate.
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All of this is only the remainder left after the application of a great
'reducing' treatment to the stock of myth. To later observers who
have been disciplined by philosophy it always seems as though, across
the history of mankind's consciousness, questions have been posed
and then answers have been attempted whose inadequacy exposed
them to displacement by other answers to the same questions. Dogma
appears as a defense against this process of displacement, as laying
something down in a written form made definitive by an extraordinary
sanction. It can be accomplished only by institutionalization, and that
makes it clear how inimical to institutions myth is. The weakness of
Marcion's plan was that he was not able to evaluate the pregnancy
with myth of his division of divinity into the demiurge and the god
of salvation, as a potential that ran contrary to his intention of organizing
an official church based on the reduced canon composed of the writings
of Paul and the pseudo-Luke.
The stories that it is our purpose to discuss here simply weren't
told in order to answer questions, but rather in order to dispel uneasiness
and discontent, which have to be present in the beginning for questions
to be able to form themselves. To prevent fear and uncertainty already
means not to allow the questions about what awakens them and excites
them to arise or to reach concrete form. In connection with this, the
consciousness that one cannot, after all, answer such questions may
enter in as an imponderable factor, as long as they cannot be averted,
in an institutionalized milieu, or disparaged as hubris, or- as in the
milieu of modern science - assigned to progress that has not yet oc-
curred. We have become accustomed to the 'rule of the game' of
professionalism in the realm of theory that also promotes those who
are only able to invent questions, and still more those who only act
as critics of the answers and who even equip them with the quasi-
ethical pretension according to which being criticized is part of the
immanent intention of all supposed answers. To expose oneself to
criticism with a bearing expressive of the enjoyment of suffering thus
becomes a professional faculty, just as being a good loser once was
one of the duties of the so-called good sportsman. Such burdens are
unknown to myth, which is why it was necessary to speak of them
here.
The disjunction between the mythical and the dogmatic frame of
mind is not complete. We must also remember mysticism, as the most
determined application of the concept of reality as momentary evi-
dence,!> as described in the metaphors of blinding illumination or blind
collision. The extreme form of experience that is described in this
language and that represents, on the scale of possible certainty, the
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opposite pole to skepticism, is indeed 'pointlike,' but is nevertheless

related, in Plotinus's speculation, to the mythical 'normal process' that
runs its course, as cosmic action, on the cosmic stage. Mysticism has
never been able to present itself by any means but that of negation,
as the infringement of the systematic framework. It needs this frame-
work in order to be able to boast of the extraordinariness of its gifts,
without being able to describe them.
The common expression speculative mysticism contains a contradiction.
Where the mystic speaks of the reality that he has encountered, he
wants nothing to do with speculation; but to speak of the possibility
of mystical experience was obviously also a concern of those who had
never experienced it in reality but who considered it indispensable as
a description of the extreme case, authenticated in the Bible in the
case of Paul, of the irresistible intensification of mere faith to the point
of certainty, which anticipates the final state of all believers.
What mysticism has in common with myth is the rejection of the
suggestion that it seeks, or gives, answers to questions. But mythological
Gnosticism, as Jonas calls it, also had to accommodate itself to the
format of the relation between question and answer to the extent that
its intellectual environment came to bear the imprint of the success
of the Christian apologetics and dogmatics that were disciplined by
philosophy, so that it was confronted by feedback resulting from the
challenge that it had constituted for the Church and the Church's
creeds. Thus its overflowing production of myth accommodates itself,
at least in retrospect, to the system of man's fundamental questions
regarding his origin and future, his nature and his potential, his welfare
and his ill fare, his fate in this world and in the next.
The rivalry with dogma induces what Jonas has called the secondary
rationalization of the fundamental myth. It is this that relates the
complex of myths, for the first time, to a canon of elementary questions.
Around the beginning of the third century A.D., Clernent of Alexandria
transmitted the systematic core of valentinus's variant of Gnosticism.
Valentin us shares Clement's own assumption that man's salvation is
brought about not by particular actions or rituals, but rather in the
form of a 'knowledge' ['Erkenntnis,' i.e., gnosis]. The Gnostic promise
is not that one will ascertain transcendent truths and be supplied with
pledges of the granting of grace, but rather that one's memory of a
story that had fallen into forgetfulness, and \vhose kno\vledge puts
the world in a different light, will be awakened. This enables us to
understand the rationalized central questions of valentinian Gnosticislll,
in the version transmitted by Clement: "What rnakes us free is the
knowledge of who we were, and what we became; where \ve \vere,
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and what we were thrown into; whereto we hasten, and whence we

are redeemed; what birth is, and what rebirth."5 One sees immediately
that this is not the stock of questions in response to which the myths
of the Valentinians, as they are reported by Irenaeus of Lyons, could
ha ve been narrated. But it is the frame of reference in relation to
which the Gnostics could define themselves as possessing knowledge.
If one wants to read the catalog of questions in the way that it was
meant to be read at the time, then one must pay attention to the
ambiguity of "whence (pothen) we are redeemed." It does not have to
designate what we are deemed from [das Wovon der Erlosung], but can
also designate what we are redeemed out of [deren Woraus]. Then it
would refer to the demiurge's cosmos, Marcion's cellula creatoris [puny
cell of the creator]. Now the cosmos had indeed become an aggregate
of evils, because it had issued from the weakness or wickedness of
the cosmocrator [ruler of this world, of the cosmos], but for that very
reason it still had nothing to do with man's responsibility. It is only
through an anti-Gnostic theodicy that that responsibility becomes the
origin of evil in the world, and thus also the sole thing 'from which'
we are redeemed. The terseness of the expression even makes possible,
or favors, the interpretation according to which the question and the
answer relate to where the redeemer comes from, which means, in-
directly, where he gets his authority. If, with Hans Jonas,6 one prefers
to interpret the expression as the spatial "out of what," then one
imports the mythical schematism of the cosmic space and its directions,
its inside and outside, into the secondary rationalization. To do that,
it seems to me, is to fail to appreciate what this rationalization in
particular had to show, namely, that the Gnostic mythology contained
answers to extremely general questions that were independent of its
imaginative framework, in that they could be formulated entirely in-
dependently of the material used to answer them - in other words,
that they could be made plausible to a contemporary as something
that affected him also.
If the system was supposed to be able to provide information on
what a redemption had to set one free from, the question-in the
interests of its general acceptance among the people to be won over-
could not yet be related to the mythical mode of expression according
to which the redemption is total precisely by virtue of the fact that it
leads directly out of this world. The question, being artificially brought
into relief, had to be kept free of a knowledge that could fall to the
lot of the outsider (to whom this was supposed to be offered as a
question that was 'already his') only by means of the answer-that
the cosmos had to perish or, if not that, that it must be possible for
man's noncosmic essential core, for that which is capable of salvation,
to be set free from it.
The secondary rationalization that is contained in Theodotus's for-
mula not only provides "a reliable guide through the whole multiplicity
of Gnostic mythology and speculation," that is, for the primary field
in which Gnosticism was expressed, but also provides the framework
of positions for the possible and necessary tertiary 'reoccupations.' So
if this does not display the questions that precede Gnostic mythology
historically, it does display the problem-concerns that the mythology
had made acute and that it leaves behind it, as soon as it perishes as
a result of the abundance of its narrative contradictions and the dis-
cipline of the Roman Church's dogma. The fundamental myth, which
is reduced here to a formula that approaches abstraction, does not
simply vanish along with the epoch to which it belongs; rather it
challenges the succeeding epoch to satisfy the needs it had effortlessly
aroused. I have already mentioned the theodicy problem, in which
this inheritance from Gnosticism and the effort of 'reoccupying' the
framework of positions that carries its imprint are really deposited. A
look at Augustine's treatise on free will, the work with which he
overcomes the Gnostic phase of his life, shows what a burden falls
on man-as the one who stands in for Gnosticism's world demiurge-
as a result of this transition, but also shows that, with this burden,
the concept of moral freedom begins to stand out for the first time. C
And that takes place despite the fact that Gnosticism had been the
most pronounced example of a nonmoral conception of the world. It
has no need of the concept of freedom because in place of an intra-
subjective decision between good and evil it provides the idea of a
cosmic contest. If what is at stake in this contest is parts of the good
that have fallen under the sway and the deluding influence of the
powers of the world, then from the perspective of a dualism that is
only an episode. In relation to man's interest in salvation, the cosmic
procedure is only a transaction surrounding him, though its reliability
does determine whether the event of the turning takes place, whether
the recall arrives. This is because the myth has a nonmythical core,
just as man, in the world, contains an unworldly deposit that at bottom
has no need at all of instruction, but only of awakening, of the removal
of deception, of self-discovery. It is possible to 'deInythologize' this
nlyth only because it possesses a preexisting residue of form. What
gives the Gnostic process its tendency to mythicization- the fact that
it is ahnost entirely event, and only minimally doctrinal content- also
exposes it to the conjecture that it could be demythologized. What
BultInann dissected out in his work on the New Testalnent, by con-
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sidering it possible and undertaking to demythologize it down to the

core of the 'kerygma,' is not something that it is always and everywhere
possible to do to myths, but rather what is appropriate to the late-
antiquity and Gnostic view of the world.
The finest and most concise expression of that ultimate quality as
an event, the content of which cannot be conceptualized, is the Jo-
hannine Gospel's "Ego eimi. "d To say "1 am he" presupposes that one
speaks thus in a world of the most intense danger and expectation,
in which it is entirely sufficient to indicate that now the time has come.
The lot of him who has forgotten where he comes from is not instruction
about what he has lost and what he stands to gain; instead what
overtakes him is only the formal summons, which sets everything else
in motion as though automatically. "Wachet auf, ruft uns die
Stimme ... " [Awake, the voice cries to us ... ], e but whatever else it
cries is of no importance. The fundamental myth gives us to understand
that nothing more than this is necessary or to be expected.
Thus the fundamental myth occupies, if one may put it this way,
a special position. It is located precisely on the axis of symmetry
between where we come from and where we are going, between what
comes to be and what ought to be, between fall and ascent. The
fundamental myth makes the importance of this position understand-
able, but it is not functionally indispensable to it. The 'knowledge'
that had given gnosis its name and that, in contrast to mere faith (Pislis),
was supposed to constitute the distinctive status of its adherents, was
not identical with cognizance of the mythical apparatus, which had
to assist in the subsequent mutual understanding of those who were
already participants in salvation. This participation was more an event
than an insight. It was the equivalent of what was later, without taking
much account of the content, to be called awakening: something like
an act of intensified alertness to one's situation in the world, to one's
foreignness to it and one's need to get out of it and, until that time,
to make it a matter of indifference to one.
This attitude syndrome presupposes an intensive vital feeling of a
need for salvation, of the loss of cosmic orientation or of orientation
as cosmos. The empty and formal "1 am he!" becomes the only
adequate way of acting on this situation, as in de Gaulle's standard
proclamation, "Eh bien! Me voici!" [Very well, here I am!]. The situation,
which can also be called messianic, does not allow it to seem important
who it is who comes-to the astonishment of the post-Christian ob-
server, who is accustomed to the definiteness of dogma, different
names were continually being used for the messianic figure. The ques-
tion of the messianic moment is solely: "Are you the one who is
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supposed to come, or do we have to wait for someone else?" The

horizon of messianism surrounding both questioners and those who
are questioned prescribes the answer: "I am he." This explains the
cry of exultation with which Marcion had begun his Antitheseis, the
work in which he rigorously reduced the biblical text by excision: "Oh
wonder of wonders, ecstasy, power and amazement, that one can say
nothing at all about the gospel, nor can one think anything about it,
nor compare it with anything else."7
If the Gnostic fundamental myth had turned the ancient world's
radiant cosmos into what was now only the blinding container of
wretchedness, whose function was to be impermeable for everything
coming from outside it and to distract, by its brilliance, from the misery
of those who are confined in it, then the savior, as the bringer of the
summons to return, had to experience the whole difficulty of this
mission in merely appearing in the world at all. Even before the
Gnostic figure of the demiurge summed up the world's capacity for
antidivinity and inimicalness to salvation, the world had already been
given the character of a container and filled with powers opposed to
Cod's will to salvation. It is no accident that Marcion based entirely
on Paul his almost dualistic theology of the foreign god who is contrasted
to the just god of the Creation and the Law. It was only with the
greatest difficulty that Paul had been able to hold to the identity of
the giver of the unfulfillable Law with the giver of absolution from
unavoidable guilt. The price of this identity was probably the assignment
of responsibility for the contradictions to disturbing factors: world-
administering functionaries who have become independent, powers
and forces of unclear character, between the spiritual and the demonic,
which may have originated in the angels of the nations in the prophecy
of Daniel.
If they had originally been part of the unity of a successful Creation,
as administrators and executors, the Fall and the condemnation of
man had to have presented to them the possibility of becoming sole
and unrestricted cosmocrators [rulers of the cosmos]. Paul seelns to suggest,
on behalf of these powers, that they had known nothing of God's plan
of salvation for man and only learned of it through Christ's saving
deed. No less plausible than such ignorance would have been active
resistance to higher authority's intentions for rnan; other\vise Paul
would not have been able to say of the archons that they treated the
"lord of the doxa " , as their prey, and that only the death on the cross
brokc their po\ver. (This, to be surc, \vas only a provisional defeat, in
relation to the final end, because otherwise no history of indefinite
length \vould have been left for further dealings back and forth.)~
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Marcion has logical consistency on his side when he puts an end

to the identity of the Pauline God. He restores to the 'god of this
world' responsibility for what Paul had halfheartedly blamed on the
demonized archons. Marcion's 'foreign god' originally has nothing in
common with man, who is entirely a product of the world creator
and, in contrast to later Gnostic systems, does not even possess the
pneuma as a way of participating in that other world. The new god,
then, has mercy on man as a result of impenetrable grace, as a result
of the same compassion with which the Gospel distinguishes the for-
eigner, the Samaritan, in the parable.
The foreign god offers the cosmocrator the death of Christ in exchange
for all those who do not want to submit to his law and who declare
this through the act of faith as an expression of separation from the
law. The offer suggests that here everything is supposed to be 'on the
up and up' and the foreign god respects the property right (by the
world's standards) that the demiurge has in men, as his creatures. In
the disputes between the two gods in relation to this 'honest' ransom,
it did not fail to come about that in retrospect the resurrection of the
messenger of salvation, after his freeing of the pagans and the damned
from the underworld, had to make his suffering and death appear as
mere cunning, if not as a fraud inflicted on the partner in the ransom
deal. Independently of the evaluation of cunning according to good
ancient standards, which Gnosticism had learned from myth, the ques-
tion arose, in response to moral objections, whether it ,vas not just
for the pedantic god of the letter of the law to be duped with the
help of the letter of the contract.
What is more important is the fact that the contract between the
gods does not remain the final denouement of the world process.
Marcion's conception contains the core of a circumstantial history,
perhaps one rich in cunning tricks, that presses for further narration
once the key event has in fact turned out not to be the final decision.
The division between those who are loyal to the law and those who
are prepared for faith is final only in the case of the underworld;
apart from that, as must have already been clear to Marcion, history
goes on.
At the same time, the determined docetism of his Christology,
disclosed by the Resurrection, curtails the mythical potential of Jesus'
life in the backward direction [in time]: The herald of the new god
'appears' in the world unexpectedly, and without any previous history,
at his baptism in the Jordan by John. The Annunciation, birth, and
childhood are expunged from the sole Gospel that Marcion recognizes
(and ascribes to Paul), the Gospel according to Luke. It should have
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been possible to foresee that such rigorism could not, in the long run,
promote the continuance of Marcion's church. The general Church's
realistic interpretation of the Incarnation was bound up in the most
palpable and lasting way with the Lukan story of Jesus' childhood.
For a theory of the affinity to myth it is certainly not being too clever
to say that the surpassing logic of Marcion's excisions could never
make up for the loss of the biblical scene of Jesus' childhood. Here
the image works in favor of the dogma. A closer examination reveals
that even under the aegis of docetism, the story of Christ's birth could
have been retained-why shouldn't he have been able to be born in
appearance just as he was to die in appearance? Here, however, behind
Marcion's antagonism of the two gods there stands another, his true
and ultimate dualism: the dualism of spirit and flesh. It was this dualism
that had driven him to reject any contact between the foreign god
and the mechanism of reproduction, and by which Christianity would
have been deprived of the figure who dominates its image world, the
figure of the Mother of God.
It has not been possible to demonstrate the existence of connections
between the early Gnostic and the late-between Marcion and Mani.
But that does not diminish the rigor of the logic by which the devaluation
of the cosmos and its creator gives rise to a dualism that continually
surpasses itself. The uncoupling of the world from the will of the god
of salvation removes the restraints preventing its demonization; but
the more impenetrable this demonization becomes, the more pressing
becomes the further question how, then, a bringer of salvation can
still appear in it at all and be successful. Marcion's god of the world
had not yet been the devil himself, but only a sort of paragon of
zealous tyranny and petty harassment. But Origen already understood
the ransom myth as implying that the price of the release of men
had been payable to the devil. That would have had to make the
initial situation, prior to the redemption exchange, more grave. Should
there still be moral hesitation about whether to cut the devil out by
means of cunning and malice? One can see how the fundamental
myth prescribes the scope of its variants.
Cunning is a category belonging to myth. It is only infrequently
apparent that as a way out of an emergency [Notstand] it can be the
privilege of the weaker party. The Gnostic deInonization of the \vorld
Inakes rnan's position in it into an emergency. The insoluble Pauline
problem of the person \vho wants to comply with the La\v and cannot
is not yet sufficient to pennit an explanation that points to a \vorld
god and la\vgiver \vho planned everything in such a \vay as to produce
t his pharisaic deadlock. Still the question relnains, \vhct her the ftInction
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of cunning in Gnosticism was not prepared in Paul and, starting from

that point, just left to work out its logic. When the archons and powers,
derived from apocalyptics, who quite naturally form the background
of Paul's idea of escaping from the power of the world, fail to recognize
Christ in his human form and his obedience to the Law and conse-
quently conduct him to the fate of death by which their own power
was to be broken, then their ignorance of the salvation plan that is
unexpectedly being fulfilled is not yet a process of succumbing to a
cunning trick. 9 Only if their ignorance is brought about 'docetically'
[i.e., by a delusive appearance] is it meaningful to speak of cunning.
The Pauline Christ does lower himself to take on human form, but
he does not instrumentalize it as a deceptive way of disguising his
essence and where he comes from. He must be able to suffer and die
in order to share the fate of men, so that by way of this equation
they can obtain a share in his overcoming of death and in absolution
through change of identity. Possibly this technique of escaping the
certain judgment of guilt by means of mystical death would be a piece
of cunning- if Paul had not deduced it from the legitimizing identity
of the God of Judgment and the God who intends salvation. That,
however, makes the story, which is only hinted at, into a mere text
for the ritual of baptism as the act of mystical participation.
The ransom myth is, originally, quite superfluous. The death of
Christ is prototypical, like the sin of Adam; as with the latter, anyone
can participate in the former, too, and nothing else is necessary in
order to obtain justification. The injury to the cosmic administration
does not consist primarily in the suspension of the Law, but rather in
the suspension of the executability of judgments of guilt as a result
of their not being executed against guilty people who, on account of
loss of identity, can no longer be produced.
If one considers Christianity's long-term self-representation and self-
justification, then God's Incarnation as man appears as its central and
almost taken-for-granted event-so much taken for granted that the
Scholastic idea of the eternal predestination of the Son of God to
become man could be conceived and thus the Incarnation could be
made independent of the contingencies of human history. But in the
early centuries it was by no means so definitively decided what the
central content of the joyful proclamation was supposed to be. The
salvation bringer's human form is initially more a procedural matter.
One did not need to think about the distinctive treatment of human
nature until that nature again had to be brought into agreement with
the continuing facts of the world. The early eschatology, with its acute
need for salvation, required only that the transcendent intervention
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be effective, and did not require an interpretation of its significance

in relation to man's self-comprehension.
The Cur deus homo [Why did God become man?]g question originally
presents itself more in relation to the overcoming of the powers that
are opposed to God than in relation to the granting of favor to man.
Consequently, less depends on the 'nature' of the salvation bringer
than on his having full power. He comes into the demonically protected
cosmos in the mask of flesh and with a pretense of belonging in the
world that is based on his suffering. He is born, it is true, of a virgin;
but the virgin is betrothed, and leaves the status of the miracle unclear;
from both the devil who tempts him and the judges who examine
him, he keeps his derivation a secret. Neither Dionysius of Alexandria,
Epiphanius of Salamis, or Amphilochius hesitates to explain the episode
of the fear of death, before he is taken prisoner in the garden on the
Mount of Olives, as feigned. As soon, then, as the individual episodes
of the synoptic tradition are connected with the syndrome of disguise,
it is no longer the case that the archons and the powers deceive
themselves, as a result of their inability to penetrate the phenomenon
and its purpose; instead, they are deceived - plainly on account of an
assessment of their power of opposition.
At the same time doubts arise about the finality of the already
achieved or immediately impending triumph. Then it becomes nec-
essary that more indexes of the true nature of the Son of Man should
be distributed through his life story. Indifference with regard to the
realism of the Incarnation diminishes as soon as people seek guarantees
of the lasting effectiveness of this single life and death. Any suspicion
that metamorphosis was involved becomes intolerable. As a source of
security for people's faith in salvation, the approach to an equilibrium
of powers between the god of salvation (on one side) and the \\Torld
powers and the demiurge who is synthesized out of them (on the
other) cannot stand up to competition.
The remnants of the initial situation as documented in the Ne\v
Testament's picture of the saving event were never understood by
the Bible criticism of the Enlightenment. The question \\Thy Christ,
when he rose from the dead, had not shown himself to the \\Thole
world, was one that Origen (arguing against Celsus) already was able
to answer only with difficulty and without support froln the sacred
texts: Only the few, he said, to whom Jesus had appeared, \vould
have been able to bear the heavenly radiance of the transfigured
Christ. In the face of the same question, Hermann SaITIuel Reilnarus
bursts out with the uncomprehending question: "My! Did he rise froll)
the grave in order to be incognito in his state of exaltedness and
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splendour?" And he immediately generalizes this to cover the entire

story of Jesus: "Did he come here from heaven in order not to show
himself as one who had come from heaven?"IO The exclamation, with
the ellipsis that is typical of the deist's style, contains the Enlightenment's
universal incomprehension of the fundamental myth of the bringer
of salvation, who must keep himself hidden from the powers and
forces of the cosmos and cannot prematurely play out his triumphs,
especially, before the whole world.
I cannot reconcile myself to the idea of a spontaneous generation
of the Gnostic fundamental myth. Paul, who, to be sure, is no
mythmaker, nevertheless set up all the points of departure for the
mythical scheme. The Pharisee's fundamental experience of being
unable to comply with the Law in spite of painstaking effort is the
source of the whole conjecture that the lawgiver might not have meant
to make it possible for man to be justified. But then a whole dimension
of explanations of the possible significance of such ill will opens up.
The Gnostic fundamental myth is the imaginative opening up of this
background, and it is evidently not the last word in this logic to say,
following Marcion, that only the god could be "foreign." It is, if not
natural, at least hardly unnatural to declare man to be "foreign" with
respect to the lawgiver and god of the world, or at least something
about man or in him that does not belong to the demiurge's world
and to the creature composed of body and soul. In the story of the
pneuma this relation of foreignness develops into an odyssey whose
symmetry was still beyond Marcion's imagining: The conditions of
the return home are prescribed by those of the expatriation.
If the thesis is correct that the genesis and proliferation of artificial
'art myths' depends on the development of dualistic axioms about
the origin of the world, the origin of man, and man's history, then
Marcion cannot have been a Gnostic mythologist as yet. He only makes
evident Christianity's susceptibility to dualistic disintegration, by shat-
tering the identity of the god of the Creation and the Law with the
god of love and salvation. There he only drew the conclusion from
what he had learned from Paul, to whom alone he ascribes the pos-
session of a revelation from the foreign god. What he made out of
this dissociation was like a piece of philological work: disposing of
false scriptural witnesses, eliminating the entire Old Testament, and
purging even the slender stock that was supposed to derive from Paul's
glimpse of heaven.
If the typical form of a Gnostic system did not yet fully emerge
here, it is especially because the god of the Law, too, still remains a
just god, despite the petty and hardhearted n1anner in which he im-
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plements his justice. But it is also because Marcion did not yet arrive
at a cosmological story of the origin of man or of his participation in
the world beyond this one. What made such a great impression on
Harnack-the development of the idea of a god of grace and love-
was the lack of a myth that would have been able to tell what made
the foreign god take an interest in man, namely, man's original par-
ticipation in the realm of that god. Just that was what Marcion did
not know about. His exotic god cares for man really without any
reason. Andre Gide could have found his finest instance of an acte
gratuit [gratuitous action] here. The stranger espoused the cause of the
miserable creatures of the world god, in which he had no original
interest whatever, and on their behalf entered into a very unattractive
legal relationship to the legitimate owner of the world. The juridical
fiction that Paul had already devised to cover the absolution of the
guilty does not generate a story in Marcion's case either; sheer grace
does not set up anything to narrate, any more than pure justice does.
The fact that Marcion's idea of the grace that the 'foreign god' does
not owe man resisted development into a consistent story becomes
tangible in connection with another weak point of his dogma. In the
course of the forcible cure imposed on the early Christian system, the
need to relate the fate of the subjects of the old god to the new
salvation had to be felt. This need had been met very early on by
the doctrine, included in the creeds, of the "descent into hell" (descensus
ad inferos). Beyond all Christ's deeds and sufferings to which testimony
was available, this doctrine had to insert between his death and his
Resurrection an invisible episode in the underworld, as an interpolated
act of fairness. By the triumphal visit to Hades, the fathers belonging
to the Old Covenant as well as the pagans who had been true to the
natural moral law were included in the (for them) delayed redemption.
Otherwise the contingent date of the saving events would have distorted
the picture of history into intolerable unfairness.
Analogies to this problem occur in history when an existential quality
that is unlike anything that has gone before it is proffered or proclairned
as being given at a particular point in time. Thus the Enlightenlnent
in the modern age will not be able to avoid the objection that \vhat
it asserted of reason-that it had only begun to spread its light over
Inankind at a recent period, and since a zero point had been estab-
lished - should not have been the case. Then by far the gTeatest part
of this totality of rational beings \vould be disparaged by the ne\v sel[-
consciousness, reason itself would be convicted of inability to eliminate
darkness and folly, and it would become questionable \,yhether the
confidence could really be placed in it that \vas bound up \vith the
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program of the Enlightenment. Lessing's Education if the Human Race,

as the first stage of all the Idealist philosophies of history, was a 'total'
myth intended to reconcile the Enlightenment with the overall history
of mankind as something that was at any rate not predominantly
irrational, but instead served to usher in reason's maturity.
I mention this here only in order to make clear the analogy to the
myth of the descensus ad inferos. It harmonized the contingency of the
date of salvation with the unalterable equality of all men in their claim
to benefit from the saving deed. Marcion could not avoid this demand
for the integration of the history of mankind either, although his
system of the nonidentity of the world god and the god of salvation,
and the latter's free grace, had neutralized the internal systematic
pressure for it. What he does with the myth now is highly instructive
in relation to the preparation of the Gnostic fundamental myth.
He distorts the preexisting model, since he cannot let the appearance
arise that his foreign god acts in accordance with the norm of justice,
and because he certainly does not want to weaken the exclusiveness
of justification through faith by introducing a subsidiary form of re-
demption. Therefore the inhabitants of the underworld, rather than
simply following their liberator through the opened doors, had to be
faced with the decision regarding faith. In this story, too, Marcion
shows himself undaunted in his consistency. When Christ enters the
underworld, he is recognized only by those who had not submitted
to the law of the world god and the justice of their creator. It is already
entirely typical of Gnosticism when the villains of biblical history are
now singled out by being permitted to recognize the herald of the
foreign god: Cain, the fratricide; the inhabitants of Sodom; the Egyptians
and all the pagans who had lived without or in opposition to the Law.
Marcion reduced the preexisting story of the descent into hell to his
gospel and implanted in it the preference given to pagans and sinners,
the lost and the godless - they had at least kept the place of the 'foreign
god' vacant and had not filled it with the wrong god.
The underworld is still part of the realm of authority of the cosmocrator.
Peneterating into it cannot be described, for Marcion's gentle god, as
an act of violence. No doubt he also makes that proceed entirely in
accordance with the rule of law, as he does the ransom transaction:
as dealing with the world god in accordance with his own standards
of justice and recompense, in view of the price paid by the death on
the cross. Marcion resisted the entirely senseless idea that the death
of the Son of God was the most perfect atonement that couid be
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offered to the Father for the sin of men. The avoidance of an act of
violence on the part of the foreign god, who is thought of as over-
whelming, vis-a-vis the world god, is the most important indication
that with Marcion the dualistic fundamental myth of the world struggle
between good and evil, on a footing of equality, is not yet fully formed.
Myth does not need to answer questions; it makes something up,
before the question becomes acute and so that it does not become
acute. We know from the Armenian polemic of Eznik of Kolb Against
the Heresies that even in the polemics against Marcion a role was played
by the argument that his doctrine required the foreign god to cheat
the world god by raising Christ from the dead. Eznik reports what is
no doubt a later development of the Marcionites' inverted version of
the descensus. According to it, Jesus descended from heaven a second
time so as to present himself to the furious demiurge, who perceived
his divinity this time and realized that there was another god besides
himself. Jesus is supposed to have said to him, "We have a dispute,
and there is no one to judge between us except your own laws ....
Did you not write in your laws that he who sheds the blood of a
righteous person, his blood shall in tum be shed?" And the demiurge
answered, "Yes, I wrote it." Then he had to acknowledge the other
god as the more righteous and admit that he himself deserved to die
and could not demand revenge for the theft of so many of his crea-
tures. II It is evident how further mythicization begins in connection
with the feeling of an unclarified residue in Marcion's construction.
Harnack sees Catholicism not indeed as the work of Marcion, but as
a result of his work. Catholicism, he says, was put together in opposition
to the heretic, and thus ultimately in opposition to Paul. It was only
against an enemy of this quality that the canonization of the contents
of the Bible and the dogmatization of doctrine could have been so
necessary and could have been accomplished in the way they were.
Marcion had tried to prevent the alliance bet\veen theology and the
ancient world's cosmology by disparaging the author of the cosnlOS;
by this very means, he brought this alliance a bout.
Marcion's solitary rank as a theologian made hirn dangerous. This
is also documented by a traditional anecdote that was meant to attest
\vhat Inight be called his negative apostolic succession. According to
the reports of Irenaeus and Eusebius, Marcion had been able to 11leet
\vith the last living disciple of the apostles, Polycarp of Srnyrna, and
had demanded, "Recognize us." That \vas his clailll to the authority
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of the apostles for his church. Polycarp's answer is supposed to have

been, "Yes, I recognize you-as the firstborn son of Satan." It is
remarkable how Harnack can take this anecdote so historically that
he inquires into its dating and ascribes to Marcion the hope that he
could "obtain the recognition of the most authoritative bishop of Asia
Minor." 12 But is it not entirely absurd to ascribe to Marcion the desire
for a recognition that would have been traceable to apostles who were
deluded by the world god and who participated in the falsification of
revelation? On the contrary, this desire is necessary for the damnatory
purpose of the anecdote, in order to give the rejection the weight of
the authority of Poly carp. It is more than the Roman excommunication
of A.D. 144 - it is the invention of illegitimacy as an institution.
When Harnack fails to recognize the defamatory character of the
anecdote, whereas he easily observes the incorrectness and malice of
Justin's comparison of Marcion to heretics who had advertised them-
selves as gods and sons of gods, this is because the oldest testimony
of all to his hero seems too valuable for him to let himself be deprived
of it. It was after all this heretic of whom Harnack confesses, "In
Church history, he was my first love, and this preference and veneration
has not been lessened, in the half century that I have lived with him,
even by Augustine. "13
When the Augustine who was just compared to Marcion wrote, in
A.D. 388, the first book of his treatise On Free Will, and in the subsequent
year his commentary on Genesis against the Manichaeans, the remnant
of the Marcionite antichurch had been eradicated by the power of
the state, shortly before - in A.D. 381 - as a result of the edict of the
emperor Theodosius I. Augustine no longer had to deal with this early
form of Gnosticism when he made the freedom of the human will
into the agency solely responsible for what is bad in the world. Freedom
was conceived, for the first time, in its immensity, inasmuch as it was
given the entire burden of theodicy to carry. A concept that was never
a part of Church dogma, nor could have become such on the strength
of the Bible, proved to be the simply effective antidote to Gnosticism's
fundamental myth. At the same time it brought eschatology to a
conclusion: After four centuries of unclarified expectations, man was
handed the responsibility for his history-no matter what else could
still be said (and sometimes said with more emphasis) about the gov-
erning of this history.
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It was resistance to the dualistic fundamental myth of the demiurge

and to its consequences in terms of the corrupt nature of the world
that forced the conception of an original sin of man, a sin whose
monstrous odium stood in no relation to the traditional myth on the
subject. The dogma of original sin was the 'reoccupation' of the func-
tional position of the demiurge, of the counterprinciple to the foreign
or good god. Everything that Augustine could become and was to
become - the philosopher of the treatise on freedom, the theologian
of original sin and choice by divine grace, the founder of the Middle
Ages' metaphysics of history - has its roots not so much in the fact
that he had once been a Gnostic but, much more precisely, in the
fact that he had been able to become a Gnostic. And not only he, but
the Christian tradition itself- and this not accidentally, but by its own
logic.
In contrast to his extended argument with Manichaeism, the name
of Marcion appears in Augustine only occasionally and incidentally.
His order of importance was recognized by another great theologian
and heretic, the Alexandrian, Origen. Origen contrasted him precisely
to the intoxication with myths, the longa fabulositas, that is characteristic
of the kind of Gnostic typified by Valentinus and Basilides, and viewed
him as the more dangerous opponent. But he did not see to what an
extent that fabulositas had found its precondition, if not its source
material as well, in the division of gods that Marcion carried out.
We are acquainted with mythifications of the fundamental Gnostic
schema that were still unknown when Hans Jonas undertook to uncover
the "fundamental myth" of Gnosticism, but which have brilliantly
confirmed his skill in conjecture. h These include, from the discoveries
at Nag Hammadi, the Apocryphon of John, which was available since
1896 in an unnoticed papyrus in the possession of the Berlin Museum
but was first published in 1955 and edited, in cornpa.rison \vith the
three versions that were among the new discoveries, in 1962. II This
is one of the oldest texts of Gnosticism, in its Barbeliotic tendency,
that are attested in the patristic writings. Irenaeus of Lyon had it
before him, at least in part, when he conlposed his refuta tion of the
Gnostic heresies, about A.D. 180. For the purpose of sho\ving ho\v
nlythopoeia works, with this text we have the additional good fortune
of having four different versions at our disposal.
This 'secret teaching' reads at first not like a Inythical text but rather
like a Inystical one, \vritten in the language of negative theology.
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Whatever could be stated about a transcendent principle had, until

that time, been developed and practiced only within Platonism and
with its means. The metaphors employed in the Apocryphon, both those
of light and those of the wellspring [QueUe], also point in that direction.
Neither in Neoplatonism nor in the Gnostic speculations about the
original principle and the 'beginnings' deriving from it is there any
such thing as reasons, motives, and purposes that could have had or
could have had to have everything that followed as their consequence.
But the metaphors of light and of the wellspring do allow one to
imagine an originating quality, a characteristic pouring out of itself
and overflowing, that belongs to the good and the perfect as a sort
of property. It was, after all, already implicit in the framing of the
Platonic Ideas - and this was what made it possible to set the shared
super-Idea of the good above them-that they command that they
should be passed on in the form of appearances, thus making it an
obligation to transpose them into images, in a process that had been
made quite plausible by the original Ideas of virtuous behavior. Con-
sequently the Platonic demiurge was a good and faithful functionary
of the Ideas, even though in imitating the Ideal cosmos he was only
able to bring forth and bring about an inferior world of appearances.
How he and his work could be evaluated, initially and later on, always
depended on which type of legitimacy was ascribed to his performance:
that of being regulated by the Ideas with the goal of their self-com-
munication, even at the cost of the diminution of the original in its
image, or that of an unauthorized and incompetent violation of the
original constituents-reposing in themselves in contented perfection-
of existence.
The Apocryphon ifJohn is stylized as a visionary experience at a date
after Jesus' Ascension. The apostle falls into perplexity when a Pharisee
by the name of Arimanias touches him on the sore point of the absence
of his Lord: "Where is your master whom you followed?" John answers,
"He has gone to the place from which he came." To this, Arimanias
replies, "This Nazarene deceived you with deception and filled your
ears with lies and closed your hearts and turned you from the traditions
of your fathers." Then the apostle falls into doubt, turns away, and
climbs the Mount of Olives, and in a solitary place he asks himself
questions that approach the 'secondary rationalization' of the Gnostic
myth: "How then was the savior [soter] chosen, and why was he sent
into the world by his father, and who is his father who sent him, and
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of what sort is that eon to which we shall go?" He has hardly had
these thoughts when the heavens open themselves to him, the whole
creation shines forth in light and the cosmos trembles. A figure appears
before him, first a child, then an old man, finally a woman. The figure
calls to him, "John, John, why do you doubt?" Thus the revelation
of the "secret teachings" begins.
The Apocryphon is recognizably competing \vith the model that Mar-
cion set up when he credited only Paul with the possession of the
pure teaching, because only Paul had been vouchsafed a direct rev-
elation, in a vision. Here John is set up against Paul, the doubter
against the persecutor.
"I am the father, I am the mother, I am the son," the revealer
introduces himself- a revealer who is no longer a mediator, since
after all the mediator has already failed to overcome doubt. Everything
that follows is a great litany of negations, whose culmination - as in
all mysticism- is the disavowal of existence itself: "He is not one of
the existing ones, but he is far superior." And: "He is unnameable
because there is no one prior to him to name him." So an art myth
comes into existence only through the contradiction that this non-
existent and nameless thing nevertheless 'has consequences,' which
are entirely contrary to its definition. From the nameless one there
explodes a cataract of names, and from silence, a superabundance of
loquacity.
This silence, in which the inconceivable reposes, prior to everything
else, is the hypostatization of its status as unspeakable and nameless.
Insofar as at the same time, however, the inconceivable is light in its
original purity and the wellspring that produces living water, metaphor,
as a violation of the principle of unspeakability, furnishes it with a
means of passing over into a narratable story: In the min-or of the
pure light-water that surrounds it, the inconceivable beholds itself. As
a result, then, of the fact that it pours itself out, it becomes present
to itself in an image, and it is already present in a traditional rnyth-
the name of Narcissus reaches back into the mystery of the origin of
things. l'i For what was imagined about Narcissus has a concealed
affinity to the ancient rule of divine autarky: A god's only object is
hirnself, as in Aristotle's 'thought that thinks itself.' Except that this
latter had no need to generate anything, because the COSIll0S that it
Inovcd had ahvays been there and only needed the 1110ving po\ver
that lay in the loving imitation of the absolute reflexiveness IRcjlcxion].
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If, now, one has to remove the pregiven eternity of the cosmos,
which makes every kind of myth impossible, then it follows logically
that the exclusive act of reflection [Rejlexion] i-which is presented
mythically as the inconceivable's formation of an image of itself, against
its overflow- turns itself into the first independent product, into the
overflow's original mode of configuration. The mirror reflection, though
it is not yet recognizable as the turning toward ruination, is nevertheless
the beginning of a story that leads to it. The more definitely dualistic
the conception of the myth is, the earlier in the story the counterprinciple
has to appear. In one of the versions of the Apocryphon this is drawn
into the language of the metaphor of light, in that darkness is also
assumed as a preexisting, original principle, whose derivation is allowed
to remain as obscure as the darkness is itself. Initially it is participating
and receptive, but it immediately becomes counteractive: "But when
the light mixed with the darkness, it made the darkness light. But
when the darkness mixed with the light, the light became dark and
was not light, nor was it darkness; instead, it was sick. "16
What emerges has the still undifferentiated ambiguity of the internal
and the external, the Ennoia ['Thought'] that refers to itself and the
Pronoia ['Forethought'] that refers to the world. What emerges, here,
out of the Inconceivable and, at the same time, in front of it, is the
primeval creature that gives this type of Gnosticism its name: The
Barbelo. It is a dual being: the emanation and self-glorification of the
Inconceivable, the first and perfect eon of glory, but at the same time
also First Man and the virgin Pneuma ['Spirit']. The relation between
this and the abundance of speculative primeval beings, beings that
both infringe on the solitude of the absolute and begin to prepare the
inconvenience of a world for it, is palpable. Each of the characteristics
with which the Inconceivable endows the creature of its self-experience
immediately stands there, as a figure in a group, as though in a chorus
around the spot of the original wellspring. These hypostatic 'subjects'
do not explain anything, but they thicken the field of names between
the Inconceivable and the usual, as if the filling of the empty space
could satisfy the need that in other cases is satisfied by 'explanations.'
The derivatives of the nameless are not adequate to what they derive
from: They are not capable of contemplating their origin. At each
stage of their behavior in relation to it, a diminution of the original
quality takes place - a reduction of their 'dowry.' The Barbelo turns
toward the pure light and looks at it. The result, for the Barbelo, is
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only a spark, which, it is true, has the same nature as the blessed
light, but is no longer its equal in magnitude. The Father still rejoices
over the fact that his pure light becomes apparent, that the invisible
beconl.es visible through the initial power of the Barbelo, but when
the unspeakable becomes speakable its power of accomplishment is
also lost in the diffusion (paras las is) of the Pneuma.
Characteristic of the linguistic form in which these speculations
appear is the mixture of abstract personifications and demonic names,
some of which stand there uninterpreted and without function and
some of which define faces and shapes, such as "Lion face," "Ass
face, " "Hyena face," or "Dragon face," so that the path from the
negations and negative abstractions finally leads to a verbal, that is,
an unexploited, perceptual aspect. Just as the Barbelo is the inner and
outer act of the Inconceivable itself, its acts also are externalized and
alienated from it, so that it fills the world with personified concepts
and allegories, with high-level imitations and with low-grade mimicries.
Thus it is finally Sophia ['Wisdom'] who brings forth the first archon,
Ialdabaoth, without - as it is explicitly stated - the consent of the
Pneuma. Ialdabaoth is the key figure in the genesis of a special and
inferior world realm, which he founds, not without encountering, in
the process, a figure of unknown derivation - in other words, of a
dualistic character- called unreason: "He took a great strength from
his mother. He went away from her and turned away from the place
where he was born. He created for himself an eon.... And he joined
himself with unreason, which was with him, and called the powers
into existence, twelve angels under him ... modeled on the imper-
ishable eons. "17 This archon is an unmistakable parody of the God of
the Old Testament. His surnames mock the latter's attributes. One
variant of the Apocryphon even assigns to him the act of creation by
means of the word, and the conferring of names. The seven powers
under him "arose through his thought and through the fact that he
said it. And he gave a name to every power."IR
Everything that parodies the biblical Creation at the same time
ernphasizes the different nature of the diffusion of the PneUlna. In
Gnostic mythology, only the archons and lower powers operate like
comInanders or demiurges; the good propagates itself only by gen-
erating [or "begetting": Zeugung] and 'spiration. 'j That is a distinction
of rank that is also maintained in the definitions employed in the
Church's doctrine of the Trinity, for the coming forth of the Son and
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the Holy Spirit as opposed to the Creation of the world. As will appear,
both processes are involved in the production of man.
laldabaoth is a jealous god. He does not want to allow to those
whom he created and \>vhom he keeps in subjection to his power any
of the light and the power that he himself received as a result of his
descent: "Therefore he called himself 'God' and rebelled against the
substance from which he came .... And he saw the creation that was
under him, and the multitude of angels under him, which had come
into existence through him, and he said to them, 'I am a jealous God,
there is no other God but me,' by which he already indicated to the
angels that there was another god. For if there were no other, of
whom should he then be jealous?"19 In this version, from the Berlin
papyrus, laldabaoth gives himself away as a result of a knowledge he
has that he would like to withhold from his subjects, whereas in Codex
II from Nag Hammadi the blasphemous appropriation of God's self-
declaration from the Bible becomes the epitome of the archon's ig-
norance: "I am God, and there is other God but me. "20 This ignorance,
though, is probably more consistent, as the presupposition of the fact
that laldabaoth can be duped with regard to man-whom he wants
to prevent, by means of the food prohibition in Paradise, from gaining
insight, through knowledge, into what lies behind his power.
A critical point in the downward direction of the Gnostic process-
not yet the peripeteia, but the thickening of the plot leading to it-
is the creation of man in the world. In this, too, a piece of the biblical
Genesis is parodied: Man, we are told, was made after the image and
likeness of Elohim. It occurs to laldabaoth and his archons, again as
a result of the mirroring process, to insert a man into their work. If
the first hypostasis, the eon of glory and the pneumatic man, was
already a reflection, then this is a reflection of a reflection, and what
they see is a copy (typos) of an image (eikon). Regarding this reflection,
they speak to one another: " 'Let us make a nlan after the image of
God and after his appearance.' And they produced from themselves
and from all their powers; they shaped a figure from themselves. And
everyone of the powers produced, by its power, a soul." So this
becomes psychical man, k and his soul has no relation to the higher
world of the pure origin and cannot expect to return to it. It is evident
that the archons deceive themselves when they think that they are
creating something after the image of God, whereas they actually only
create it after a second-level image-after the copy of a copy, which
Plato had already condemned as the artificiality of art. The archons
"produced it according to their own image, which they had seen,
according to the copy of the primeval being, the perfect man. And
they said, 'Let us call him Adam.' ... "21
The involvement [of God] with man does not arise through or consist
in the fact that the prototype was obtained surreptitiously and, in
addition, was copied sloppily and contemptuously. Nevertheless,
through the surreptitious use of the image a relation comes into being
between the highest principle and this botched piece of work, a relation
that goes over the head of the demiurge who was responsible for the
work. This relation binds the Inconceivable to this creature and causes
it to undertake a momentous deception of Ialdabaoth. Ialdabaoth is
induced to give some of his pneuma [spirit] to the man he has fashioned,
in addition to the demiurgic psyche [soul]. It is through the pneuma
that the demiurge participates in the higher world of the prototypical
mother Barbelo, of the mother Sophia. He transmits it-because of
ignorance of what, in so doing, he does to himself- on the advice of
the "Five Lights," who come to him in the form of his own 'angels'
and prompt him to give life to the human figure by breathing on it:
"They advised him so as to bring forth the power of the mother, and
they said to Ialdabaoth, 'Blow into his face something of your spirit,
and his body will arise.' And he blew into his face of his spirit, which
is the power of his mother; he did not know this, for he exists in
ignorance." Unintentionally, he has established Adam's problematic
of salvation and given him a share in the heritage of the higher world,
together with a prospect of legitimately belonging to it.
In the Barbeliotic myth, the recovery of the pneuma from the world
is not the first thing that is achieved by deceiving the powers of the
world. The endowment of the illegitimate psychic copy with pneuma
is, to use Hans Jonas's formulation, "a stratagem of Light" in its
struggle with the archons: The creator of the world is weakened by
his completion of man. According to this version, everything that
follows seems to be the reward for the fact that it was possible to
ilnpose a decisive handicap on the demiurge in the beginning. If at
the same time this was the act that established a guarantee of salvation,
that bound the highest power to care for the fraction of it in the
innermost part of man, still that was only a side effect of the larger
cosmic argument. But it will make it necessary for that pow'er to make
a sYlnrnetrical outlay of cunning on the other side of the curve of
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salvation, when it is necessary to retrieve the deposit that the demiurge

was tricked into transmitting.
When the powers of the world see, now, that Adam's body shines
as a result of the pneuma, they become jealous of him. A rivalry arises
between the angels and man, the rivalry that medieval authors were
still to describe as the motive for Lucifer's revolt and fall: The prince
of the angels receives a vision of the future Incarnation of the Son of
God as man, and his jealousy is inflamed by the preference shown
to this physical creature, over all the angels. Thus here too, in the
Gnostic myth, the prelude to man's temptation and misfortune is the
revealing to his makers, by the luminosity of the pneuma, of the
superiority that he has gained over them in power and understanding.
For them, everything now depends on the success of their conspiracy
to mislead man about his origin. The travesty of the Paradise myth
makes the entire ambiguity of the familiar scenario apparent, an am-
biguity depending on whether it is viewed in terms of the archons'
intentions or in terms of the good principle's plan of salvation.
The prohibition against eating from the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil is meant to block man's access to the deposit of the
higher world of light in this garden. For Marcion, this was the first
act of a petty god who wanted to treat man roughly with law and
judgment. Ialdabaoth's prohibition is issued "so that Adam would not
look upward to his perfection and would not notice his nakedness in
relation to perfection." Then what, for the Bible, is the original sin
would be the truth for Gnosticism. According to one version of the
Apocryphon, everything depends on man's not recognizing his nakedness,
because the latter is a falsification of his prototypical body by the
mortal one that was constructed by the archons: "They remained by
him so that he would not look up to his pleroma [fulfillment] and
recognize the nakedness of his deformity (aschemosyne)."
The biblical mistakes about Eve that were perpetrated by the hope-
lessly ignorant writer Moses are cleared up. She does not lead Adam
astray, she leads him to self-knowledge, since he discovers in her his
nakedness, the deformity of his body, the pervertedness of his situation:
"And he became sober from the drunkenness of the darkness, and
he recognized his image.... "22 Eve is, in fact, the image-which has
remained hidden from the archons-of the primeval mother, Barbelo,
who is doing penance for her misiake, and makes amends by suc-
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cessfully asserting the principle of life against Adam's deathly body.

That is why she is also called Zoe, the mother of the living.
The figure of the first woman, in her relation to the Barbelo, is
especially instructive in relation to the changed point of view that the
parody of the biblical text requires. One version obscures this by
having Ialdabaoth seduce Eve only after the expulsion from Paradise,
and beget with her the bearers of the two biblical names for God:
Yahiveh, the bear-faced, and Elohim, the cat-faced. These are the
same of whom men believed that they were called Abel and Cain. 23
Only with the begetting of Seth by Adam does the descent of mankind
begin.
In the other version Ialdabaoth sees the picture from the wrong
direction, when he takes Eve's nakedness as the expression of her
seducibility-and then is himself seduced, into propagating a principle
that he himself does not know and whose origin is foreign to him:
"He found the woman as she was preparing herself for her husband.
He was lord over her though he did not know the mystery [rnysterion]
that had come to pass through the holy decree."24 What seems more
consistent, in this version, is that Eve is seduced before the expulsion
from Paradise takes place. A special feature is that the first archon
gives the human beings a draught of Lethe, a water of the incapacity
for knowledge, "so that they should not know from whence they
came." Prevention of gnosis is the essence of the archons' concern. 25
It is permeated with jealousy of the unexpected and unforeseen spe-
cialness of man: "When the first archon realized that they were exalted
above him in the height and that they think more than him, then he
wanted to dominate their thought, not knowing that they surpass hiln
in thought and that he will not be able to dominate them."
In this myth everything depends on whether Adam's descendants
can see beyond the horizon of their coming from the hands of the
archons and discover how they belong to the realm of the pneuma.
Ialdabaoth's offspring-Yahiveh, the ruler over the regions of the
\vater and the earth, and Elohim, who rules over the regions of fire
and air-noisily present themselves to man as, for him, the ultimate
agencies, who determine his fate. But it is still part of Paradise that
man for the first time gains clarity about his essential home and
recognizes his nakedness by means of the forbidden fruit. That is \vhy
he is expelled from the place of his self-knowledge. The 'tclnptcr'
had been the same revelation-bearing spirit of light who disclosed the
Apocryphon to the doubting apostle: the Barbelo or the Sophia or even,
following the Berlin codex, Christ himself, who presents the Paradise
scene to John in the first person: "I, I revealed myself in the likeness
of an eagle on the tree of knowledge ... so that I might teach them
and awaken them out of the depth of sleep. For they were both in a
corrupt state, and they realized their nakedness. "26 Waking from the
sleep of narcosis and the discovery of nakedness are the two absolute
metaphors of the act of gnosis, both of them having a negating relation
to man's falsified condition in both his body and his world.
The Paradise scene of the Gnostic art myth is the inversion of the
biblical one, its destruction [Destruktion], not its allegorical interpretation.
For it is at the bidding of the highest ranking forms taken by emanations
from the Inconceivable that Adam and Eve disregard their creator's
prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree, and they bring mankind
very close to its final salvation. What happens when they notice their
nakedness is not a sobering realization of how they were seduced and
disobedient; it is 'enlightenment' regarding the perversion that has
been inflicted on them, as possessors of the pneuma, by the archons.
The salvation story is entirely preformed in Paradise. That, too, is a
mythical structure as imitated by the art myth: The second 'enlight-
enment,' whose failure is supposed to be prevented by the Apocryphon,
only repeats the first one-with the same central actor, in fact, in the
metamorphosis (in the first case) of the eagle and (in this case) of the
person of light.
The expulsion from Paradise banishes human beings to the cavity
underneath the world's matter. This is the ultimate consequence of
the intention of depriving them of a view of their origin. So the author
of the biblical text fell into the first archon's trap when he defamed,
as the devil's malice, the tempting statement that the fruit of Paradise
would make humans be like gods. But just this, to be like gods, had
been their destiny since they had received a share of the pneuma.
The Gnostic myth reads the interlinear version of the biblical Genesis.
It would be nonsense to speak of an "influence" of the Bible on
Barbelo-Gnosticism. Rather, the Apocryphon is the extreme form of
aggression against a stock of images assumed to be familiar.
At the end of his revelation, the spirit of light goes on to reveal
how he became active as a savior. He followed the human beings into
their captivity in the world and the body, so as to awaken them from
their anaisthesia [insensibility]: "And I entered into the middle of their
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Chapter 2
prison, which is the prison of the body. And I said, 'He who hears,
let him rise up from the deep sleep.' "27 Part of the ritual is that, after
the awakening, the one who awakens is sealed with five seals, in the
light of death; from then on death cannot regain power over one who
has been marked in this way. The savior commands John to write
down these secrets and to deposit them safely. They are protected
by a curse against frivolous exposure.
And that already contains a hint of the weakness of the Gnostic art
myth: It belongs to an arcane literature that remains withdrawn from
the discipline exercised by an audience. That allows it to take on the
character of unbridled prolixity, of fanciful proliferation, which is not
subject to any process of selection. The myth that is given out as
"secret teachings" does have variants, but they were clearly not exposed
to any process of comparison. The litany and the piling up of repetitions
that can be imposed on a small sworn group do not encounter any
threshold of boredom and indifference because even being tortured
by them strengthens one's consciousness of being among the chosen.
That is well known from totalitarian systems, where the speeches of
leading functionaries can be just as long as they are boring, as though
there had never been such a thing as rhetoric-rhetoric being a skill
needed by those who are still seeking power. It is also generally true,
in connection with ritual and texts associated with worship, that one
wants to be able to show what one endures 'for the cause.' So the
Gnostic art myth degenerates under the hothouse treatment that is
accorded to it as a result of the sanction that lies on it and that keeps
it distant from any 'judgment of taste. '
After the verbal opulence and profusion of names in the Gnostic
version-or better, inversion-of the Paradise myth, we can compre-
hend for the first time what is involved in Nietzsche's accomplishlnent
of turning it around in three sentences and fitting it into his assignment
to history of a direction aimed at the supennan.
Half a century earlier Ludwig Feuerbach made of this, in one single,
albeit long, sentence, something that appears more harmless: "It is
indisputable that the only correct interpreter of Genesis is one who
recognizes that it is from the same tree fi-om which Adam picks the
fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, \vith the enjoYlnent of \vhich
he loses thc paradise of life, that the leaves also COIllC \vith \vhich he
covers his nakedness."n Profundity is a quality that is currently dis-
dained. We cannot allo\v ans\vers to questions to be profound. But
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Part II
the little connection that F euerbach establishes between the fruit and
the leaves of the tree of knowledge-between its relation to morality
and the necessitousness awakened by that relation - is hardly an answer
to any conceivable serious question, and yet it has the ambiguity that
can be called profundity because each interpretation of it leaves the
extent of what is not yet exhausted undiminished.
I am going to make a jump here and offer the shortest one-sentence
variation of the Paradise myth, which was found in Georg Simmel's
diary after his death: "The apple from the tree of knowledge was
unripe." What eminent skill at minimal modification together with
maximal transformation is here displayed. The framework of the story,
which is only alluded to, remains, and yet the mood of the whole
thing changes ironically. The prop, which at first was only supposed
to be a forbidden enticement and a means to becoming a god, itself
moves into the focus of consideration. So little thought has been given,
in the entire tradition, to the fruit itself, that we have believed, from
the pictures, that the text must have referred to an apple, although
it contains no such thing and Feuerbach's version, because of the
service subsequently performed by the leaves, makes one think more
of a fig tree. Simmel diverts us from the fact that the price paid for
the fruit of Paradise was Paradise itself; he would like to know what
the fruit was worth apart from the prohibition and the temptation. It
was not rotten, it was worse than that: It was unripe.
This is worse because it means that the right moment for the crime
was missed. It is not that the gain resulting from being led astray
could not have contained what it promised; instead, even the simple
pleasure that could have been had by waiting a little bit was missed.
A quality that cannot be enforced either by gods or by men, because
it is only granted as the gift of time - the ripeness of the fruit- had
been left out of consideration. Here everything depends on how the
accent is applied: It is not the Fall from Paradise, the forfeiting of
freedom from death, or the quarrel with the benevolent master of
the garden that distresses the late thinker, but rather the vexation
caused by the fact, which is paradigmatic for all ages of mankind to
come, that the fruit had been taken from the tree of knowledge a
little bit too soon, too hastily, and thus the only compensation for the
loss of Paradise had been forfeited.
One perceives that while this is a total myth, it could not be a myth
for Illankind as a whole because it is tied to an individuality that feels
211
Chapter 2
sorrow in view of the unripeness of what might have been the only
fruit that could have been worth mankind's sufferings. Without the
individual behind it, who utters this sentence, the reader would be
left with the scandal that he and others, and perhaps everyone, are
not allowed to be more deeply dismayed over the lost Paradise and
the burden of labor in the sweat of their brows than over the unripeness
of the fruit of knowledge. Simmel himself never published this sentence.
It stands in his diary, and it is the unseemly curiosity of the epigones
that confronts us with an angle of vision that may only be permissible
privatim [privately].
That raises the question whether such a thought, inscribed in a
diary, is an accidental aper~u or an approach to the disclosure of a
personal fundamental myth. The procedure of carrying over the model
of an epoch's imagination, which in any case can only be arrived at
by inference, into the sphere of biography is certainly not beyond
question, even in a case where an author has himself thought of looking
for a prior mythical formulation as a means by which to make clear
the unity and totality of his judgments and opinions as a conception.
I intend to illustrate this fact by the example of the later Scheler and
the characteristic affinity of his metaphysics for myth.
The archaeologist Ludwig Curtius recollects a last encounter with
Max Scheler in the summer of 1927, when the latter stood before his
door in Heidelberg, toward the end of the dinner hour, so marked
by age and illness that Curtius had to identify himself to the man he
had known since their youth. 29 Curtius describes impressively the ex-
posed and insecure temper, reciprocally penetrating both personality
and teaching, of the thinker, who had been, as it were, a silent par-
ticipant in everything "impure in the age," and whose "need for
deliverance," as well as his "search, on one new path after another,
for God," had arisen from his entanglement in the guilt of his age.
On that occasion Scheler had recited to him, "as the final form of his
philosophy," the myth of the Indian god who became man (Krishna),
who as one of his trials on earth had, while swimming across a strealTI,
to contend with the serpent of evil, and overcarTIe it by flexibly adapting
himself to all of its enveloping loops until it let him go in exhaustion.
Curtius concludes his account by connecting the myth to Scheler: "This
doct rine, too, was a self-confession."
No\v Scheler was still able to give his o\vn 'edition' of the myth
a ftcr this, in the lecture entitled "Oer Mensch im Zeit alter des Aus-
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Part II
gleichs" [Man in the era of adjustment], which he delivered in November

1927 in Berlin and which appeared in the posthumously published
volume Philosophische Weltanschauung, in 1929. He takes as his point of
departure the quotation from Bacon according to which we can conquer
nature only by obeying her. Here it is the world serpent, the "symbol
of the causal nexus of the world," from which Krishna, at the call of
the heavenly father, who warns him to be mindful of his divine nature,
withdraws as easily "as a lady draws her hand out of a glove. "30 Perfect
flexibility as the principle of liberation is contrasted to the idea of the
domination of nature, in which Scheler sees the Judeo-Christian image
of man brought to its logical consequence "in keeping with the idea
of a creator God, a God of work." Interpreted in this way, removed
from its direct moral relation to the thinker, the myth represents
everything that Scheler had written since the treatises on the phe-
nomenology of sympathy and on ressentimenti in the construction of
ethical systems, in his most productive phase, between 1912 and 1914:
cosmic Eros, Franciscan sympathy with nature, and confidence in
Being [Seinsvertrauen] as an antitype to the idea of exact science, to
technicization, to ressentiment, and to the mistrust embodied in theory.
Except that at that time this repertory had innervated his movement
toward Catholicism, whereas now it stimulated the metaphysics of the
'God in the process of becoming' [des werdenden Gottes], who, drawing
on the liberation of the life impulse in the 'stormy weather' of the
world process, provides himself with the energy-which was missing
from the purity of the sphere of essences - that he needs in order to
realize himself The world comes into being not through the biblical
fiat [Let it be] but rather through the non non fiat [Let it not not be] of
this self-empowerment. Man is the decisive executor of the movement
that comes from the world ground; he alone is able to unite the
intuition of essences [Wesensschau] and experience, spirit and stress [Geist
and Drang]. He does this with the elasticity of the Indian god-man, if
he follows the thinker and his myth.
The history of Scheler's influence on the last years of the Weimar
Republic is confusing, because almost every factor that gave this phase
its character becomes involved. But the misunderstanding of Scheler's
'fundamental myth' by the sympathetic and fascinated but cautious
archaeologist nevertheless provides food for thought: An extreme cos-
mological extrapolation is 'reintimized,' almost read from its author's
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Chapter 2
physiognomy. What was meant as the task of mankind becomes the

personal problematic of Scheler as he neared his death.
From here I suggest we look back at another fundamental myth
and its proneness, at the time, to being misunderstood. Schelling's call
to [a professorial chair in] Berlin appears to the liberal Vamhagen von
Ense, the widower of Rachel, as the epitome of all the darkening
trends of the age of Frederick William IV. He cannot come to terms
with this "philosopher with a calling to instruct the age," and char-
acterizes his lectures, which soon lead to public strife, as "old Scho-
lasticism" and "paltry fairy tales. "31 In Vamhagen's diary there stands,
under February 24, 1842, the brief formulation of Schelling's fun-
damental myth: "First God produces himself, but then he is still blind-
only when he has produced the world and Inan does he become able
to see." The only response to this that Vamhagen can manage is the
single exclamation, unforgettable for the admirer of that great pro-
duction, his diary: "What a scandal! So he is blind for a while, like a
newborn puppy?"
Both Scheler's and Schelling's total myths represent a modem type
of art myth that is brought about by violating dogmatic rules of the-
ology: God is not the absolute being, his attributes are not optimized
all around with universal quantifiers. He can create a world, but he
is unable to see it; he is the epitome of pure essentiality, but he lacks
the power to bring an essence to reality. The story becomes narratable
because a deficiency, and thus a goal, is ascribed to God, a goal to
arrive at which the world and man are precisely the correct, though
also risky, means. This remythicization of the concept of God that was
'purified' by philosophy demonstrates how myth and divine impotence,
or at least diminution of power, correspond to one another. But what
is primary is not that one ascribes a goal to God but rather that one
shows that the world and man are his necessary, irrevocable, and thus
no longer contingent 'means.' The more intilnately the goal is incised
into God's being, the higher the value that is found when one weighs
up the means of achieving it. The adjustment accomplished in re-
rnythicization allows man to win to the extent that God loses -loses
so as to win, for the first time, through man and with man. The world
and Inan are the absolute circumstantiality of God's dealings \vith
hilTIsclf.
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Part II
Translator's Notes
a. Literally, "work of the concept" (A rbeil des Begriffs). The author is using Hegel's language
here.
b. This concept of reality is one of several that the author distinguishes in his "Wirk-
lichkeitsbegriff und Moglichkeit des Romans," in Nachahmung und Illusion, ed. H.R. Jauss, Poetik
und Hermeneutik 1 (Munich: Fink, 1969). See especially pp. 10-11.
c. This "reoccupation" process and Augustine's role in it are discussed in detail in part 2,
chapter 1, of the author's the Legitimacy if the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
d. John 18:5.
e. The first line of a well-known Lutheran hymn, which was reworked by J. S. Bach as the
initial anthem of his cantata BWV 140 (information supplied by the author).
f Doxa refers to divine radiance, glory, majesty, or mode of being. See author's note 22 to
the next chapter, and the article cited there.
g. Title of a treatise by Saint Anselm. See next chapter, note 33 and related text.
h. Kunst der Vermutung "art or skill of conjecture" alludes t? Nicholas of Cusa's concept of
the same name, introduced in his De coniecturis (1440).
i. The German Rejlexion signifies, without distinction, the logical 'reflexiveness' or self-reference
of the "thought that thinks itself' and the visual reflection of an image in a mirror.
j. Hauchung "breathing spirit" (pneuma, literally, "breath") into something; also the process
by which the Holy Spirit is brought forth by the Father and the Son.
k. Psychical as possessing mere soul (psyche), as opposed to the "Spirit" (pneuma) that distinguishes
the "First Man" and the ("pneumatic") possessor of gnosis.
1. Ressentiment, literally, "resentment," is a term often used, since Nietzsche's Genealogy if

Morals, to describe the rankling envy that seeks cunning ways of depreciating and depleting
whatever is strong. The two works of Scheler that are referred to in this sentence are Phanomenologie
und Theorie des SympathiegejUhles (I 913) (later editions entitled Wesen und Formen der Sympathie),
in Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1954- ), vol. 7, translated as The Nature if Sympath)1
(Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1973); and "Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen," in Vom
Umstun der Werte (1915), in Gesammelte l¥erke, vol. 3.
3
Myths and Dogmas
Scimus deum de deo nasci,

quemadmodum de non deo non deum.
-Tertullian, Ad nationes
[We know that God is born of God, just as what is not God is born
of what is not God.]
"Deum de Deo
Lumen de Lumine
Deum vero de Deo vero."
-Credo of the Roman Mass
[God from God,
Light from Light,
True God from true God.]
The discovery of the narcissism involved in small differences sho\ved

us how they open deep chasms between people. Large differences
become established as matters of course and elude perception precisely
on account of their superevident presence. One of the fundamental
circumstances of the history of our consciousness has long avoided
observation and statement; it concerns the equality of power that we
like to solemnly assert as holding between the classical [Greco-Roman]
and the biblical roots of this history. I do not dispute this equality of
power; what I have in mind is the similarity between theIn in one
respect that affects the volume [of their effects] and thus the possibility
of observing them empirically. Myth, as it was translnitted by the
ancient world's texts, excited, propelled, impregnated, and stirnulated
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Part II
the imagination and the formal discipline bf the European literatures

in a unique way; whereas the biblical world, in spite of the incomparably
greater depth to which it penetrated the consciousness of the two
millenniums after Christ, is nearly absent on the level of manifestation
in literature.
In the line of the great figures of German classical philology in the
nineteenth century, none stood so equally close to both worlds, the
biblical and the mythical, as Jacob Bemays, son of a Hamburg rabbi
and the author of the most convincing solution to the puzzle that
Aristotle left behind him in his theory of the operation of tragedy. In
correspondence with Paul Heyse, who was always eager for out -of-
the-ordinary subjects, a Bemays drew attention to the "tempting il-
lusion" that the biblical materials were similar to epic ones and would
have to be suited to "great tragedies." The difference, however, between
the mythical and the biblical materials, the difference that prevented
the modem dramatist from making use of great new models, of which
it was painful to be deprived, was "such an essential one that the lack
of success of biblical dramas up to the present can be blamed on their
authors only inasmuch as a poor writer betrays himself by his choice
of poor material." What prevents the poet from making use of the
figures in the Bible, he writes, is the way they are fixed in a written
book, and the incomparable presence of this book in people's memories.
A writer who expanded or deformed this material, even by a little,
would have to fail by verging on parody. It is only with figures who
stand entirely in the background, like John the Baptist, that it might
be possible to do sOInething. "But with lava like Saul, which broke
out from the innermost part of the volcano and is now rigid and
brought to an eternal standstill in the Book, I doubt that anyone will
ever be able to do anything new." It is not an accident that Shakespeare,
who "after all, rummaged everywhere for subjects, never burned his
fingers on a biblical one." 1
Images that are fixed in written form-one can go on-imply a
sort of verbal 'prohibition of images, 'b which does not affect the fine
arts in the same way because their means are not canonically stamped
and promulgated in advance. The description of this state of affairs
is the first, formless encounter one can have, within our cultural horizon,
with the antithesis of myth and dogma.
The fact that its reception is not superadded to myth, that it does
not enrich it, but that instead myth is handed down and known to us
217
Chapter 3
in no other condition than that of always being already in the process

of reception, is the result - in spite of their iconic permanence - of its
elements' capacity for being deformed, of the fact that (to use Bemays's
words once again) it is not composed of "figures of granite," any
recourse [ZugriffJ to which must tum into a violation [Sich-Vergreifen].
Bemays does not make a point of the difference in ethical or sacral
quality between the biblical and the mythical figures, in order to
explain each type's disposition to or lack of availability for reception.
He cites only the single circumstance that what is handed down in
sacred books is 'fixed in written form' [Jestgeschrieben ']. That is an
entirely formal aspect; but it has as a consequence that in relation to
what is fixed in writing, a kind of work begins that is very different
from work that relates to a fundamental stock of images: This is work
directed at producing bare compatibility between historically heter-
ogeneous communications that were never originally laid out with an
eye to later painstaking scrutiny.
Myth has called forth impudent and satirical exaggerations of its
contradictions. A book religion produces the opposite: a transition to
abstract conceptual formulation as a way of avoiding the difficulties
that arise on the historical and perceptual level. Which of the escha-
to logically wrought-up members of the original Christian community
could even have dreamed that the Lord, whose return on the clouds
of heaven everyone thought he could expect within his lifetime, had
been characterized by or expressed anything like the hypostatic union
of natures or the Trinitarian unity of the persons in one divine nature,
as they were to be defined by dogma? Dogmatists existed only because
heretics existed; and heretics existed because more than one route
could be taken in evading the difficulties contained in the original
contents of the Holy Scriptures. But these were by no means equally
legitimate routes, so that finally one of them was recognized as right,
and was able to determine who had been wrong.
I do not start from the premise that this process disguises a naked
decisionism;c the history of dogma, too, contains a principle of selection.
Perhaps even Marcion could have won the prize of survival if he had
not given the impression of dealing with the letter of Scripture in a
way that was all too liberal, and thus authorized less sagacious disciples
to pursue such dealing without consistency. It is not the philologists
(and Marcion is one of their ancestors) but the philologists' students
who have always spoiled everything.
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Part II
One can go beyond the formal consideration of the difference be-

tween myth and dogma, variable freedom from writing versus fixation
in written form. If one proceeds to matters having to do with content,
one will have to undertake differentiations that are not so much eidetic
as matters of tendency. For who would want to deny that the biblical
God has mythical features, even if his uniqueness limits- the possibility
of stories [Geschichten] about him to those having to do with his ap-
pearance in history [in der Geschichte]? His jealousy of other gods is,
from the beginning, not a question of his relating directly to realities
that he recognizes as such. It is much more a rivalry-operating in-
directly through the behavior of men and decided on the battlefields
of the history of a nation - with the gods of the peoples round about.
In Sinai, Egypt is stripped off, in a bloody manner, and dies out as
well, during the desert generation, so as to produce-if one may put
it this way- the striking force of dogma for a new field of testing and
temptation among Canaanites, Moabites, and others. This is what will
make possible even the restoration after the Babylonian exile, the re-
'creation' of the sacred books 'from nothing.'
Among those who returned in 538 B.C. -a half century after the
destruction of Jerusalem-there cannot have been many left who had
been led away into exile in 586. The time in which to drive out Egypt
in the desert had been shorter than the· time, on the banks of the
Euphrates, in which to forget everything and let memory die out. But
in the meantime this had become a religion of priests with a centralized
cult, a divine system with strict regulation of every feature of everyday
behavior, and above all with written original documents. Only those
could take part in the rebuilding of the Temple \\JThose monotheism
had remained unquestionable. That meant not only renunciation of
the cultural liberality of the 'pantheon' but also the loss of all those
who, in the foreign land, had been or had become willing to make
concessions. It was a repetition of the destruction of the cult of the
golden calf, carried out with the different means granted by history
since that time. What the reformers Ezra and Nehemiah made a reality
was the first selection of those who were disposed toward the strict
observance of a dogmatic mode of existence founded on the Scriptures
of the covenant.
Prohibitions of the making of images are easy to transgress, granting
the remarkable exception (which turns aside into such exuberant or-
namentation) of Islam. The Decalogue's prohibition of images has been
219
Chapter 3
pushed to one side by the Christian tradition to an extent matched

in few other cases, not illogically in view of the fact that God was
supposed to have made himself visible in the meantime. But his def-
inition as one who is invisible continued to be preponderant. His saints
have stimulated the representational imagination more than the face
of the Son of Man, which remained unknown, is nowhere described,
and our deprivation of which is forced on our consciousness by the
notorious shroud. Myth easily crosses the boundary of the realm of
visibility. It may make difficult demands on the capacity for visual
perception, like the direction to imagine the three Graeae as equipped
with one shared tooth and one shared eye. It makes up for that by
forgoing the demands of what is essentially invisible. Epiphanies do
not require justification of the intentions and cunning lying behind
them.
In the limiting case the Enlightenment critic can ridicule the pedantic
hermeneuticist. Thus Abraham Gotthelf Kastner ridicules Montfaucon,
who had written regarding Pluto's acquisition from the Cyclopes of a
helmet that makes its wearer invisible, that he had never yet seen
this helmet in a portrayal of Pluto, and that such portrayals in general
were less common than portrayals of the other gods. Kastner's comment
on this, in a single sentence: "Did Montfaucon expect to see Pluto
portra yed with the helmet on his head - in other words, represented
in circumstances in which he was invisible?"2 The compelling force
of the rule of invisibility in the case of the spirit has the result not
only that the third Person described in Christian theology has been
particularly unpopular in or even absent from iconography but also
that even in the New Testament texts the problem of how this Person
is to make an appearance becomes evident when it takes on fornls
that it should after all by no means have been allowed to take on-
the God who is said to scorn every kind of docetism takes the fonn
of a dove at the baptism in the Jordan, of flames at the Pentecostal
outpouring. At Luke 3:22 the pneuma hagion [Holy Spirit] appears, at
the sounding of the voice from heaven, "in a bodily shape like a
dove" - and there stands the treacherous pagan \vord eidos [shape,
form]'
In the fine arts, too, the sacred has mainly been treated in tenns
of the response to it. Burckhardt, looking at the dome of San Giovanni
in Parma, observes that it is only in the corona composed of John's
fonner fellow apostles that Correggio has achieved a lnagnificent so-
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Part II
lution of the problem of representing John?s vision on Patmos: "These

prodigious men on the clouds are archetypes of all kinds of power
and plastic richness"; but in their midst and as their point of reference
Correggio has made a Christ float in the air about whom one has to
say that "I wouldn't give much" for him. 3 Nevertheless, as Burckhardt
remarks the next day, the painter was deeply stirred by his vision of
the superearthly realm. But then something astonishing dawns on the
viewer: the retranslatability of the sacred world, once it has been put
in visible form, into the mythical. "One can in fact even think of it
as translated into pagan form: Prometheus, lying on the Caucasus,
sees his earlier comrades, the other Titans, floating down to him." It
is not Christ, but the visionary, John, who is compared with Prometheus,
while the apostles are compared with the Titans - the floating Christ
does not remind the viewer of anyone.
Our subject here is not the greatness of the invisible God but rather
his capacity to become, even independently of his cult and places of
worship, purely by means of the word, 'real' and thus (if the expression
will be excused) capable of unlimited transportation. The capacity to
endure through exile and the capacity to be propagated in missionary
fashion over exotic distances are only two aspects of the same
characteris tic.
In a midrash on the book of Exodus there is the sentence: "Two
things Israel asked of God: to see his form and to hear the words
from his mouth."4 Even disregarding the sequence, it is amazing that
this is said about the same book of the Pentateuch that contains God's
statement that "Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man
see me, and live." Consider that if this were translated into myth, it
could only have been said of the head of Medusa. Between the pro-
hibition of images in Exodus 20:4 and the threat of death in Exodus
33:20 there is an inner coherence of denial, which expands into a
renunciation of stories. But the threat of death is precisely not founded
on any sort of 'spiritual' status. Invisibility here is the unbearableness
of something-looking God in the face-that might in principle be
possible for a more steadfast or a more worthy viewer. The status of
something as spiritual is different. In the biblical prohibition of images
the God who thinks is still unknown, not to speak of the God who
thinks himself, so as to preserve his autarky. This latter God determines
the conception of a principle of the world that is not allowed to bear
any of the world's characteristics.
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Nothing of what mystical vIsIonaries have ever said about their

glimpses through the chink of transcendence is found or is even merely
hinted at in the Old Testament: At God's feet there is splendor, and
the prophet's vision reaches at most to the border of his raiment. If
the conjecture is correct that the Old Testament's ark of the covenant
was a throne brought along on the journey through the desert, then
it was an empty throne. 5 More than God's hand is not to be seen on
any of the pictorial evidence discovered by archaeology; and this is
already an amazing liberty in pictorial representation, when the pictures
on the wall of the synagogue of Dura show God's intervention [Ein-
greifen: intervening' grasp '] in the sacrifice of Isaac, and his hand grasp-
ing the prophet Ezekiel by the forelock.
But the prohibition of images is of course much more general than
a mere prohibition of images of God; it is above all a prohibition of
images of man. Here it appears as a retrospective systematization if
one suggests that, on account of the biblical formula of man as being
made in God's image, making images of man would have amounted,
indirectly, to making images of God, so that it was logical to include
man in the initial prohibition of images. That is fine, but it is clearly
the kind of thing thought up by theologians. A more obvious objective
would be to eliminate the misuse of pictures of people in magic, a
practice, just as infamous as it is widespread, whose offshoots extend
all the way into the epoch of photography.
The invisible presses toward processing in the form of dogma. Utopia
also belongs in this category. As a limit concept, it commands one to
think what no man's eye has ever yet seen, even if its more harmless
instances produce motley fancies of increased indolence. In its inten-
sified instances utopia is the result of a sum of negations, when it is
focused solely on avoiding contamination by what currently exists and
when it culminates in a prohibition against saying anything positively
imagined and graphically descriptive about the new land as it will be
after the bursting open of all delusion systems. d That is logical in the
circumstances, but at the same time it serves to protect from doubt,
by means of mandatory invisibility. It has to be reprehensible to depict
the future if one is supposed to be able to be confident that it is
produced by necessity as the dissolution of all oppression. The utopian
prohibition of images demands submission, by refusing to provide
stories. He who doesn't tolerate this is one of those who already, on
other occasions, remained in wretched unbelief because they did not
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see. It is remarkable what a variety of formations of this elementary

type have been created in a short period: Barth's dialectical foreign
God, Bultmann's kerygma, Heidegger's Being, Adorno's restoration
by "negative dialectics" of the pure and empty horizon of possibility.
Utopias are poor in images because every image spoils the ideal:
There is an invisible God in every form of provision of happiness for
mankind. Consequently no narrative or iconic core constituents of
utopias that are, nevertheless, described have developed. The title
"utopia" has held fast the fact that it emerged from the travel romance,
from the idea of things being different elsewhere, not from extrap-
olation into the future. The latter was first made possible by the
addition of the idea of progress, and thus already implicitly makes a
heresy of any position that could hinder, through mere subjectivity,
what will 'tum out' as an immanent result of the logic of history. So
the images of an undefined past become all the stronger; the memory
of servitude in Egypt is stronger than the expectation of the Promised
Land. Yahweh always remained more distinctly the God who had led
the people out of Egypt than the God who had promised them the
land.
The result of this asymmetry is that wherever the historically definite,
datable past seems to contain guarantees about what is possible and
to come, it tends toward myth. In his theory of social myths, Georges
Sorel described constructions of an indeterminate future as effective
and having few [practical] inconveniences when "the strongest incli-
nations of a people, of a party or of a class" are enclosed in them.
Such inclinations "recur to the mind with all the insistence of instincts
in all the circumstances of life." The myths that give expression to
these inclinations would have to "give an aspect of complete reality
to the hopes of immediately impending action on which the reform
of the will is founded." Then social myths would not come into conflict
with the experience acquired, in the course of their lives, by the people
they represent.
Sorel's examples, by which he does more than just illustrate this
thesis, are instructive. The early Christians' expectation of the apoc-
alypse, in spite of its failure, had brought Christianity "such a great
profit" that there were scholars like the Abbe Loisy who wanted to
relate Jesus' whole preaching to the apocalyptic myth. Luther and
Calvin had, it is true, awakened hopes that were by no means realized,
and seemed to their present-day adherents to belong more to the
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Chapter 3
Middle Ages than to modem times; their central problems were prac-
tically forgotten; and yet from their dreams of a Christian renewal an
"immense result" had followed. In the case of the French Revolution
one can say that it could not have been victorious without its images
and that its myth had utopian features, because it "had been formed
by a society passionately fond of imaginative literature, full of con-
fidence in petite science ['popular science'] and very little acquainted
with the economic history of the past." Nevertheless, although the
utopias came to nothing, this revolution may have been much more
profound than the people who constructed social utopias in the eigh-
teenth century could have dreamed. 6
It seems to me that in his theory of social myths Sorel underestimates
the dimension of the indeterminate past and consequently arrives at
a function for myth that seems quite formal. What was at work in
the social myths of the Enlightenment was not the definition of an-
ticipation but rather the fiction of recollections. In spite of Rousseau's
explicit stipulation that the state of nature was unrepeatable, the pre-
history of man as a natural being who lacked nothing, which Rousseau
invented, was a proclamation of the contingency of every contemporary
cultural and political condition. In that respect it was, above all, the
antithesis of the other theorem of the status naturalis [state of nature]
that was decisive for the modem age, the one that defined the state
of nature as the epitome of the reasons compelling the establishment
of state power.
Regarding early Christian eschatologism, too, one can say that it
could find resonance only in a retrospective view of a history (barely
framable, chronologically) in which God had disposed over the world,
mankind, and his people with sovereign decrees of weal and woe, so
that he certainly could be believed capable of the annihilation and
definitive replacement of the world, as the winding up, putting the
seal of finality on everything, of his power over it. Neither Olympian
Zeus nor the Aristotelian philosopher's god could have been found
capable of such supremely mighty dispositions over the history of the
world and men. It is always the dimension that lies behind that produces
the scope of definable expectations. This scope, however, is exclusively
a factor affecting the present, its self-colTIprehension, the energy of
its processes-not their goal-directedness. Even if there had been, for
only one historical moment, an original Christian COlTIlnunity in which
the Scnnon on the Mount had become - or even merely had a like-
224
Part II
lihood of becoming-the rule of life, then .the whole apocalyptic dis-

illusionment, the tremor relating to the eschatological goal, in the early
centuries would be insignificant. Sorel sums up his description of the
my the social, as a factor that refuses to define the future, in the concept
of a means that operates on the present. To apply it, in terms of
contents, to the course of history would be meaningless.
In the concept of the social myth, which Sorel invented in 1906,
the minimum of what could still bear the title of myth is arrived at.
No story is told any longer; only a background of desires, of rejection,
of power-will is touched on. The way Sorel speaks of the "general
strike," it is a title for an overwhelming occurrence of a concentrated
manifestation of the will to a jenesaisquoi [an 'I don't know what']. The
strong point of this final myth lies in its power of exclusion: It is a
canon by which one can always know and will what is not allowed
to exist. But with that it reaches its amazing convergence with dogma,
which in its origin is the canon by whic~ to exclude heresies.
The social myth is the residue left by a 'demythologizing' process,
exactly like Bultmann's kerygma-which allows one to say, at every
step, what was myth-and Heidegger's Being, which is found by a
continual process of eliminating the characteristic features of 'entities.'
This mode of thought simulates the provision of answers to questions,
such as would inevitably arise in theoretical contexts, by means of a
refusal of importunity. The prototype of all models of refusal is that
contained in the name-giving as the refusal of a name in the Old
Testament, where God, by naming himself, simultaneously makes
himself known and withholds himself: "I will be who I will be" [Ich
werde sein, der ich sein werde1. So at any rate Luther translates (since
the verb haya has no present tense) "ehyeh ascher ehyeh," for which
(assimilating it to metaphysics) the Septuagint puts "Ego eimi ho on"
and the Vulgate "Ego sum qui sum."7,e It is only to the late ear, spoiled
by too much philosophy, that the refusal of a name in this perpetually
mysterious formula can have seemed like a whispered prompting by
Being.
The refusal of images, the refusal of stories, the evasion even of
the naming of a name, the isolation from all involvement with wives
and children - all of this only prepares the way for the suspicion that
in the covenant of history as well this God is a partner who poses
conditions that cannot be satisfied. This suggestion, which fully emerges
from the context of Phariseeism in Paul, produces an interiorization
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and an increased pressure of the need for deliverance, a need that

since Egypt and the Exile, and even under Roman rule, had had
characteristics of externality. The fact that this God was supposed to
ha ve made man after his own image and likeness never took on the
character of an initially unilateral obligation, free, as yet, of any re-
ciprocal duty. Otherwise it would not have been evident, either, why
it should have had to come to a new theology that replaced the relation
of man being the image of God with strict identity on both sides of
the covenant. The theological hyperbole only becomes understandable
if one has in view the failure of a formulation that fixed God's com-
mitment to unconditional aid to man at a high level in terms of its
initial conditions.
It was Heine who settled accounts with the consequences of dogmatic
monotheism most bitterly when he asked himself, with regard to
Shakespeare's Shylock, why this dramatic character could only become
a tragic figure, although he was introduced as a comic one. Heine's
answer-which is not in harmony with the origin of tragedy and with
the breaking off of its possibility in history-is that this was the result
of monotheism, that "fixed idea" whose "bearers are too weak to
master it and are overwhelmed by it and become incurable."8 The
God of this fixed idea is one who can only make demands, because
he has no adversaries in the form of competing gods, as on OlyIllpUS,
and man cannot play this role. The mode of behavior that is appropriate
to absolute demands is, Heine says, precisely "martyrdom." If the
antithesis was originally between monotheism and polytheism, it is
not repeated in this form. It passes over into the final form of the
mutual exclusion of monotheism and pantheism.
Now, that pantheism was the logical consequence, taken up again,
of the proposition that everything was full of gods was not Heine's
most characteristic idea. Heine sees the victory of pantheism after
monotheism, not at all as a liberation from the latter, as relief from
the brutality of transcendence, but rather as an intensification of that
"martyrdom" into a "storm of persecution" that has no equivalent
in the past. If everything is God, then no one can want, any longer,
to have a god, his own god, as in the case of Paul in Athens, for
whom-in spite of the superabundance of gods-there had been the
point of entrance and contact represented by the "unknown god."
But all the indications run counter to Heine's construction of a dOgInatic
pantheism. Pantheism has never existed except under conditions of
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Part II
tolerance. When everything is God, the separation of powers attains

its perfect form: The original concentrated embodiment of all sheer
abandonment to an antithetical position that is outside the world or
indifferent to the world is played down in a leveling off of powers. If
everything is God, the proposition that a God exists loses its meaning:
Pantheism and atheism are equivalent with regard to the absolute
quality of the world.
Something else must be considered: Pantheism has no absolute
relation to the future. If the universe itself is God, nothing can arrive
that would not have already been present. To quiet the unrest regarding
the future that sets in after the end of antiquity and as a result of
Christian eschatologism is one of the nostalgic motives promoting a
new renaissance, this time the renaissance of the Hellenic cosmos or
of the muses or of the Olympian and Dionysian gods or of that entirely
unknown something/someone that "Being" may have been before
the pre-Socratics.
Or does everything depend on the possibility of being able to believe
that the Messiah has not yet come? The future Messiah is an idea; it
can be burdened with all sorts of self-denial and need in the form of
anticipation. No dogma is needed to determine who it will be and
what nature he will have. The Jews' Messiah is supposed to come as
one who is totally unknown-as, in the literal sense, a figure of what
has never been present before. Consequently every word about him
can be a prohibition of imagery, rejection of myth, suspension of
history. Rabbi Israel of Rischin taught that the messianic world would
be a world without likenesses/ because in it the comparison and what
is compared could no longer be related to one another. But that would
apparently mean, Gershom Scholem comments, "that a new mode
of being will emerge which cannot be pictorially represented."9
Pure anticipation, defined only by negations, may seem unserious
in the context of historical hopes that have always already been dis-
appointed. On the assumption that the end of likenesses will not
emerge from the necessity of history, but rather as the opposite of
history, it sustains the sum total of wishes precisely in that, responding
to none of them in particular, it respects and intensifies the subjectivity
of the idea of happiness. The Christian anticipation of a future visio
beatijica [beatific vision], in contrast, is entirely bound to the ideal of
the presence of truth through theory-a projection, as it were, of the
ancient wise man into the final state of Christianity's blessed. A hap-
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Chapter 3
piness of theoreticians, for theoreticians, who keep ready for supposedly

lower desires the title "kennel happiness" ["Gliickseligkeitsstall"],
The Messiah who already came a long time ago is, first of all,
memory; second, a defense against allegedly mistaken definitions pro-
duced by a dogma that is guided in each case by what the greater
number is able to agree to; and finally a figure subject to historical
criticism. As such he threatens, in the hands of his late theologians,
to dissolve, to lose his familiar historical contours by becoming a
product of syncretism. If it has to be said that the Messiah has already
been here, then the difficulties that follow hard on the question of
what he brought with him are inescapable.
Something has to be exhibited, and in the circumstances the only
thing that this can be, apart from the display of doubtful relics, is
something invisible. In Christian theology it is the store of Christ's
infinite merits, administered by an institution that emerged from the
eschatological disillusionment of the discovery that the time and the
need to establish oneself again under worldly conditions still remained.
The economy of the invisible store of grace requires draconian safe-
guards in the form of a mode of distribution, from sacraments to
indulgences, and above all in the form of dogma. Controversies about
grace become symptoms of the paradoxical situation of having to
administer the Messiah's legacy.
If he has not come yet, he excites the imagination without over-
straining reason. No burdens of proof are involved. The longer people
have already waited, the longer they can still wait-that is almost a
law of temporal proportions in history. It is suspended as soon as
there is even a hint of a procedure by which to bring about the final
event. That is done for example by celebration of the most extreme
sinfulness as something that the divine onlooker at history is expected
to find intolerable, or by assaulting his favor with law-abidingness,
with the zeal of conversions, which is thought to be able to satisfy a
precondition for the dawning of the apocalyptic day of redemption.
The result of a comparison [between the two positionsl in terms of
energy seems to be entirely in favor of absolute expectations. Even
so, it will never be possible to decide definitely whether the prohibition
of wishes and of images that goes with a messianislTI that is open
toward the future can achieve free openness to any fulfilhnent Jfreie
Besetzbarkeit], beyond all myth, mysticism, and doglna, and \vhat that
\vould cost, historically. In this regard Scholern has said, impressively
Part II
enough, that the Jewish people has had to pay the price of messianism
"out of its own substance." The magnitude of the messianic idea, he
says, corresponds to the "endless powerlessness in Jewish history."
What it produces is not only consolation and hope. "Every attempt
to realize it tears open the abysses which lead each of its manifestations
ad absurdum [to absurdity]. There is something grand about living in
hope, but at the same time there is something profoundly unreal about
it." In this relation to history, he says, persons lose their singular worth,
because they can never fulfill themselves. The constitutive lack of
fulfillment in everything that that energy potential attracts to itself
depreciates the person-who is referred to the presentness of his life-
in the center of what one could perhaps call his realism. Scholem's
most precise formula for this state of affairs is that the messianic idea
in Judaism "compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can
be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished." In
this respect, he says, it was "the real anti-existentialist idea."
One no longer reads that without an effort to bring to mind what
the final remark refers to. It was contained in a lecture, "Towards an
understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism," which was first
published in 1959, so that it derives from the decade of existentialism,
in which almost anyone would have had to understand what was
meant by opposing messianism to this dominant philosophical for-
mation. Existentialism, too, had aimed at an existence without like-
nesses, but without any postponement of this moment. For to be
"authentic" and to exist in "authenticity" is itself the only metaphor-
taken from the traditional distinction between modes of speechg -
that it permitted itself Looking back, we can differentiate the two
positions more precisely. The messianic idea, as the anticipation of a
condition that cannot be grasped by the imagination, is truly antiex-
istentialist in its retroactive effect on the situation of the person in the
present- forcibly depriving it of all claims to unmediated fulfillment.
But in regard to the 'essencelessness' ['Wesenlosigkeit'l of the future
condition, it itself formally complies with the standard of freedom
from likenesses, of not being 'carried over' [iibertragen]h and of being
incapable of being carried over, to which existentialism gives the title
of "authenticity." In a less newfangled language, it is the replacement
of transitive truth (veritas) by intransitive truthfulness (veracitas). It is
composed not of instances of knowledge but of decisions, or better,
of the disposition to make decisions, of resoluteness toward what does
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Chapter 3
not yet exist and is not determined by what exists. A world of res-
oluteness is also a world without similes.
The tum of expression that speaks of a world without likenesses
[or parables] is, of course, also directed against the New Testament's
way of saying that the kingdom of heaven is like this or like that. The
only difference is that the speaker of the parables himself, in the
process of dogmatization, withdraws from the status of similitude, so
as to gain the complete seriousness of the realism by virtue of which
man is no longer an episode, no longer the provisional world func-
tionary, but instead has become the divinity's permanent destiny. To
prevent that from appearing as an intolerably contingent fact depending
on the arbitrary presence or absence of human sinfulness, Scholasticism
in its Franciscan lineage contrives a dogmatic device that, though it
never became the official teaching of the Church, withdraws the In-
carnation from its merely historical status. Duns Scotus's doctrine of
the eternal predestination of the Son of God to be incarnated as man
makes man's history a matter of indifference in comparison to God's
intentions for him. His reality had become equivalent to his ideal
quality. Placing the accent on the timelessness of the decision in favor
of man's redemption made it possible to deal with the difficulty that
the realization of that decision had become a contingently dated event
in the past. The eternal predestination of the only-begotten Son to
become the Son of Man was the most extreme antithesis of the char-
acterization that Irenaeus of Lyon had given for the Gnostic Chris-
tological myths; according to their teaching, Jesus had passed through
Mary in the way that water flows through a tube: "dicunt J esum,
quem per Mariam dicunt pertransisse, quasi aquam per tubum .... "
Has a theism ever been able to afford to contradict human needs,
to renounce everything in favor of the absolute purity of the concept?-
to deny itself concessions to identification with a nation, to the aesthetic
optics and acoustics of the cult, to images, to desires that souls should
be taken care of? Wouldn't that conjure the 'golden calves' out of the
ground?
When in the 1930s the talk was of the new German myth of the
twentieth century,i the question what stabile spiritual form could have
prevented susceptibility to this myth seemed urgent. Apropos of a
remark by Einstein about Hindenburg, Thomas Mann notes in his
diary that the Jews' greater sense of the truth could be attributed to
the fact that they had no myth and that their brains \vere not "be-
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Part II
fogged" with it. 10 To the extent that that. was not meant only as a
piece of ethnopsychology or psychology of religion, and did not just
provide an occasion for the antithetical remark that the internal German
"movement" of those days was "a prime example of the German
spirit's wallowing in the manure of myth" - to the extent, then, that
it was meant as more than this, it had to favor the discipline of a
purely conceptual monotheism as a reserve of resistance against myths.
But almost at the same time that he was writing about this movement's
"fraudulent, time-worn pretension to be a 'return,' " the author of
thejoseph tetralogy was in the process of writing the monumental epic
of the recurrence of the same and carrying out, without conceptualizing
it yet, a program that he defined in 1941 under the rubric of "myth
plus psychology": "It is essential that myth be taken away from in-
tellectual Fascism and transmuted for humane ends. I have for a long
time done nothing else." 11
When, then, after renewing the biblical myth, he was renewing the
German myth of Faust, doubts about this notion occurred to him. In
September 1943 he begins the ninth chapter of Doctor Faustus and
notes, to his confusion, how the emotion aroused among the German
emigrants by reading samples of the book began to be combined with
a "patriotism that seemed curiously premature." It puts him in a
critical mood, and he takes it "as a warning against the danger of my
novel's doing its part in creating a new German myth. "12 The whole
range of questions about possession of or freedom from myth is touched
upon in these notes. Does it facilitate the sense of truth if one expects
to possess only a little truth? Is conceptual thought [der BegrifJl equal
to the task of rooting out the stocks of images, or is it only the
monopoly of the management of images that must be attacked, and
the indestructible need-'position' reoccupied by something else, by
humanized myth? Or is every offer of myth finally drawn into the
vortex of the vague needs of a self-definition that was conceived at
some time, and unhesitatingly placed in the service of the corresponding
renunciations?
If one examines the historical experience of the modem age, one
finds the incomparable lesson, which is seldom taken to heart, that
could have been drawn from the possession of the sciences and from
their historical form: to see the nonpossession of truth as what- in
contrast to the promise that the truth would make people free-still
COInes closest to such a liberation. It may be that the history of science
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Chapter 3
is still too short to make this upshot of intimacy with it manifest to

the consciousness of the epoch. But there is reason to fear that the
satiety with that same science relates to and is based on precisely its
procedure of continual retraction, on obsolescence and transition as
the modality of its possession of truth. In that case, even before the
greatest gain could be drawn from the age of science-the gain that
consists in its very form of knowledge - the realization of this profit
would have been fiustrated by reluctance to pay the cost that it involves.
If it is correct that the supposed possession of too many truths
damages the truth-damages the sense of truth and especially the
sense of other people's truth-then the Enlightenment was right to
see tolerance as the most important criterion for distinguishing between
myth and dogma. "Theogony" did not lead to any disturbance of the
peace, Voltaire says, and describes this as an admirable characteristic
of antiquity. It could, he says, at the same justify one in setting hopes
on philosophy, although philosophy has not yet submitted its homo-
geneity with myth and its heterogeneity to dogma to proof It is "very
bad manners to hate one another on account of syllogisms." 13 Precisely
because the idea of justice is a truth of the first order, which is always
sure of universal consent, "the greatest crimes that afflict society are
committed under the false pretense of justice. "14 Philosophy too seems
inclined, following the supposed dictates of higher ideals, to disregard
the ideal of tolerance that it developed. Already in antiquity, for the
Skeptics, and now for the Enlightener, the multiplicity of philosophical
schools provokes the supposition that they are all equally dogmatic.
Only if the central topic of philosophy becomes ethics does it have
nothing more to do, essentially, with those positions and disagreements:
"As all the philosophers had different dogmas, it is clear that dogma
and virtue are entirely heterogeneous in nature. "15
No matter how startling this appears at first-myth becomes, for
this Enlightener, the pure precedent demonstrating the independence
of moral obligation from dogmatic positions, from given contents of
theory: "Whether they believed or not that Thetis was the goddess
of the sea, whether or not they were convinced of the war of the
giants, and the golden age; of Pandora's box, and the death of the
serpent Python, etc., these doctrines were in no way connected \vith
morality. C'est une chose admirable dans l'antiquite que la theogonie
n'ait jalnais trouble la paix des nations [It is an adlnirable fact that,
in the ancient world, theogony never disturbed the peace of the na-
Part II
tionsl." Voltaire always has the Indians or ~he Chinese handy in order
to demonstrate that nothing is so fabulous or absurd that it cannot
be believed, but with the assurance that no significant consequences
and disagreements relating to moral feeling and its reliability result
from such certainties.
Here philosophy is evidently inferior to myth in that it, in particular,
claims to establish this connection between its theoretical and its prac-
tical constructions. There is-Voltaire assumes-no moral dogma. But
philosophy, in striving to give a rational basis to something that does
not need a rational basis, dogmatizes morality -just as theology had
done - and thus for the first time makes it sensitive to doubts and
critique aimed at its foundation. On the other hand, precisely because
myth, on its 'theoretical' side, is fantastic and hypertrophic, its variants
and contradictions had no effect on ethics.
Put paradoxically-even though among Voltaire's examples there
are no frivolous ones (as there usually are among his examples), so
as not to spoil the impression in this case - the immorality of myth,
in its contents, is a kind of protection for morality in its independence
from these contents. It is in the same way- so the inference must,
after all, run- that one should also regard the arguments and con-
tradictions among philosophers, although they would not admit this
themselves: "Of what importance is it to the state whether we share
the opinions of the realists or the nominalists? . . . Is it not evident
that all of this should be as indifferent to the true interests of a nation
as a good or bad translation of a passage of Lycophron or Hesiod?"16
Does Voltaire forget that he had ahvays believed or at least always
acted in accordance with the principle that in the service of a 'good
cause' there must also (if not above all else) be good writing? This,
incidentally, has nothing to do with the advice, coming from a different
source, to the effect that where there is good writing, it must be in a
'good cause.' But Voltaire turns noticeably away from the Cartesian
assumptions of the early Enlightenment, which assumed that the con-
nection between physics and ethics, between science and the conduct
of life, between theory and practice, was a relation of conditionality:
that the completion of the knowledge of nature will provide everything
that must secure the acceptance and permanence of a morale dijinitive
["definitive ethics": Descartes] that is adequate to reality. This had
after all still been the source of the pathos of Fontenelle, who had
pictured the identity of science and enlightenment for a century.
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Chapter 3
Voltaire's experience conflicts with Fontenelle's expectation: The

observation of the history of science in his time-the indecision, which
to him was incomprehensible, between Cartesianism and Newtoni-
anism - had exposed the realm of theory as a region of dogmatic
intolerance. The melancholy of Voltaire's retrospective consideration
of myth implies the neutrality of its stories, in their contradictions and
even in their immorality, for the private and public standard of the
norms of life. The great surprise is that the theological dogmatics is
only a special case of the need to have precise knowledge about what
is invisible-whether it be vortexes or gravitation, the Trinity or grace-
and not to allow anyone to make different assertions about it. And
this on account of the assumption that absolutely everything depends
on the truth, or even on one truth- from the finitude of a proposition,
an infinity of consequences results. Voltaire was confronted with this
type of situation, in the present, in the form of Pascal's argument of
the wager, which he bitterly attacked.
Pascal's argument had been one of absolute seriousness, the pure
exhibition, never surpassed, of the dogmatic calculation according to
which nothing could be too much and could be taken too much to
heart or too strictly if everything is at stake. The heart of Voltaire's
repeated outbursts of indignation against Pascal's calculation on the
infinite is that man does not have an interest in God's existence that
outweighs his interest in his nonexistence. 17 But Voltaire did not inspect
the other side of the relation at all: the statement that a finite life is a
negligible stake in return for a possible infinite gain. In this undiscussed
premise the finite life is viewed from outside, always as the life of
someone else, whom the thinker, as though he were an onlooker at
the acceptance or rejection of the wager, has before him. Seen from
within, as the only life that a person has, it is - precisely on account
of its finitude-the simply unsurpassable, and in this sense 'infinite,'
value, which cannot be a 'stake' in a 'winning strategy,' and is not
equaled by any summation of other values. Pascal's wager-like every
other modem offer, equipped with dogmatic coefficients, of compulsory
happiness-is a calculation that is always drawn up for other people.
Perhaps the next step in this reflection would have been to suspect
or to assert that convictions are, in general, not important in relation
to behavior. Socrates was not condemned because he did not believe
in the gods or becaused he would not have shared certain convictions
of the people around him. He had to die because he did not \vorship
Part II
the polis's gods or because he was suspected of diverting others from

such worship. The public interest-and Voltaire identifies with this
interest-is only in people's behavior, not in the motives that lead
them to this behavior. That may be a superficial analysis, since the
stability and dependability of behavior, and consequently its reliability
in the future, very definitely hinge on the clarity of the reasons people
ha ve for it. It is in the public interest to be able to count on trustworthy
behavior on the part of the citizens of the polis in any kind of situation,
including those in which the constraints of conformism are weakened.
That is the point at which the hidden aspect-motives, even the pos-
sibility of giving rational arguments for behavior-becomes a matter
of public interest: in other words, the point at which morality, while
it is not always a context on which legality depends, can nevertheless
become that. Here myth has no function, no effectiveness, no trust-
worthiness whatsoever. It draws its vitality from the frivolous as-
sumption that the world's capacity for explanation and the need to
give rational grounds for behavior in it are not what matters.
Behind many of Voltaire's texts there stands the idea that it is easier
to behave virtuously when one does not possess too many firm opinions,
dogmatic convictions, or, collectively, 'truths.' Seen from the perspective
of this assumption, myth fills the empty space in which truths are
otherwise inclined to establish themselves. For Jacob Burckhardt this
is indicated in the symptomatic fact that despite all its authority, the
most influential oracle of the Hellenes, the oracle at Delphi, had "never
uttered a religious truth having general significance." Evidently no
one inquiring there, before the end of the purely Greek period, had
assumed "that the god would enter into such matters," either. 18
Myth contains an implied concept of reality. 19 What it intimates, in
its stories and its figures, as valid reality is the unmistakability of gods,
to the extent that they intend to appear: the incontestability of their
presence for the person to whom they mean to appear-something
that what goes before and what comes after can neither contribute
anything to nor render doubtful. But that is not a validity that myth
demands or (still less) requires that one concede to it, not a validity
for which it even strives or makes itself accommodating, or the ac-
knowledgment of which it would reward with premiums. The fact
that the people of whom it tells are supposed to have had experiences
with gods that had this momentary unavoidability does not imply
anything with regard to the people to whom it is told.
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Chapter 3
The way in which a god appears differentiates the mythical from

the dogmatic mode of consciousness. The fact that a god can appear,
and thus remove any doubt that he is a god, need have no effect on
the status of the story as beyond question if the manner of the dem-
onstration, the display of presence, the instrumentation of evidence,
is essentially different. There is probably only one myth that contains
this differentiation as a differentiation in the divine appearance itself:
the story of Semele as one of the many mythical mothers of Dionysus.
Semele was the only mistress of Zeus who was not content with
the form in which he appeared to and slept with her. That was her
downfall, and was so intended by Hera, who in the form of her nurse
had whispered to her that she should make sure of her lover's true
form, since otherwise she might be dealing with a monster. So Semele
told Zeus that if she was to continue to accommodate his desires, he
would have to swear by Styx to grant one request for her; when he
obliged her, she demanded that he sleep with her in the same form
in which he went to Hera. Of what happens next, there are, under-
standably, two versions. According to one version, anyone who sees
a god in his true form must die; as a result of the stupendous experience
of the epiphany, Semele, giving birth to Dionysus, dies. According to
the other version, Jupiter appears to her as a bolt of lightning, which
strikes her dead, so that Dionysus, not yet having been carried to full
term, has to be taken from his dead mother and inserted in Zeus's
thigh. The second version is the result of adjustments made necessary
by failure to understand the first one.
This is evident from the fact that Zeus keeps his promise in a
counterfeit manner, since the lightning bolt is not his true form but
only his attribute, the instrument of his wrath and his punishment.
What is 'translated' in his appearance as the lightning bolt is the
presupposition, stemming from Phrygia, where Semele originated,
that one who sees a god must die. That would not have worked in
Greek myth: Zeus had appeared to Semele as Zeus; she knew whom
she was dealing with. Thus, Ovid, too, only says that he carried out
the oath by fetching the inescapable lightning flash, the inevitabile
fulmen, down from heaven, reducing his \vrath's power and his flaming
rage to the minimum and with it entering Semele's father's house,
which was destroyed by the resulting conflagration. Hesiod alluded
to the story, which was unintelligible to hin1, only because he had to
lnention Zeus's splendid son, Dionysus, who gladdens Inany and is
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Part II
exempt from death, in listing the sons of Zeus - but of his mother all
that he had to say was that she, who had once fallen into the power
of death, was now a goddess, just as her son was a god. 20
Ovid was not able to overcome entirely the inconsistency in the
story, between its two heterogeneous premises. Hera's ruinous advice
diverges noticeably from what Zeus's mistress then actually demands
on the strength of her lover's oath. In the context of the Greek notions
of gods, Hera knows that there is no difference between the form in
which her husband comes to her and the one that he exhibits for
Semele. Therefore, she inspires, on the one hand, the suspicion that
someone else may have pushed his way into the maiden's chamber
under the name of the god and, on the other hand, toying with the
idea that it is not enough that it actually is Zeus: "nec tamen esse
lovem satis est ... "; he must also embrace her exactly as he does his
wife: "tantus talisque." She suggests to her rival that this would involve
demanding of the god that he also equip himself for her with the
attributes by which he is recognized: "suaque ante insignia sumat!"
From the point of view of the jealous goddess, this is the decisive-
the ruinous -part of the wish, because it refers to the lightning bolt.
In fact the poet forgets the important point. He makes Semele wish
only for the one thing, that the god should be for her the same as
he is for his wife: "da mihi te talem!" What the temptress had separated
out, Semele forgets to wish for; but Zeus does not forget to grant it.
He takes the lightning bolt and appears with it, not as it. 21
In that case, what initially brought death to Semele (who later became
a goddess) would not have been the sight of the god but rather his
anger, with which, while he does adhere to his oath, he exceeds the
literal content of the wish and thus makes it disastrous. The incon-
sistencies make it evident that the background contains a state of affairs
that was unintelligible for the Greeks: one in which man can experience
certainty of a god's presence only through its unbearableness.
So, the concept of reality as momentary evidence includes disparate
modes of certainty. The exclamation of the Cumaean sibyl in Virgil:
"deus ecce deus"-"The god! See, the god!"-when Aeneas and his
companions enter the grotto of the oracle points precisely to the fact
that one becomes aware of such a presence without terror and death,
that one can have it pointed out to one. In comparison to this, think
of the way Paul was struck down on the occasion of his vision at
Damascus.
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Chapter 3
Aeneas had not doubted, either, when Jupiter sent Hermes to him
with the command that he abandon Dido and continue his journey;
although an incredible thing is being demanded of him, he does not
hesitate, any more than Abraham does when he receives the absurd
order to sacrifice his only son, the son of his old age. The biblical God
has a perceptually irresistible impetus in his appearance, the indes-
cribable and untranslatable 'splendor,' the doxa of the Septuagint,
which, as the latinized gloria, is speculatively identified with the Roman
'honor,' the essence of all the divinity's aims for the choruses of angels,
for the world, and for man. For, according to the principle of autarky,
God cannot be allowed to have other objects and aims outside himself.
This change of meaning undergone by Yahweh's chabod, which would
not have been possible in the context of Greek myth, is one of the
premises of Christian dogma, whereby an epoch-making, systematically
fundamental concept of the world goal is developed out of a title for
the subjective experience undergone by one who is singled out to
ha ve God appear to him. 22
There is no such thing as an 'adherent' of myth. Since it commits
people strictly to a stock of propositions, what comes through in no-
menclature [like that just discussed] is the dogmatic form not only of
thought but also of institutions. To that extent, too, dogma is a mode
of thought associated with self-assertion. The modality that belongs
to propositions in relation to which the 'sheep' can be and are meant
to be separated from the 'goats,' and the formulas of exclusion-
anathemas-that go with those propositions, presuppose an attitude
according to which it is possible to define a core stock of modes of
beha vi or and assertions that deserve to be defended. In contrast to
that, the mythical mode of thought is characterized by an almost
unlimited capacity for combining heterogeneous elements under the
heading of the "pantheon." Even the earliest instances of it that are
accessible to us are, to carryover a historiographical catchword for
the condition of late antiquity, "syncretisms." In the Fasti-his poem
on the pagan 'ecclesiastical year,' the Roman calendar of festivals-
Ovid reduced the principle of the pantheon, as a logical result of rnyth,
to a very concise verse: "Dignus Roma locus, quo deus omnis est"
[Rome is a worthy place, where every god is found].
What myth lacks is any tendency toward continual self-purification,
toward a ritual of penance for deviations, toward the casting off of
what is impertinent as the triumph of purity, toward the judgment
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Part II
of souls. Myth has no outsiders, something .that the dogmatic attitude

needs in order to keep itself under the pressure of definition. What
afflicts the dogmatic attitude is something that it, itself, continually
generates: heretics. These had each believed, for a long time and
mostly ingenuously, that they were engaged in the one, shared task,
only to risk, one day, one item of definition too much, which turned
out to be a point that they could not carry. Here there is no such
thing as an invition to agreement. One who asserts something, risks
everything.
Origen is the most important example. The founder of Christianity's
first systematic theology almost inevitably became a heretic and, like
few others, met this fate after his death, in his literary remains and
his great influence. Marcion had been a shrewd, reductive spirit; Origen
is a constructive intellect who is almost to be measured by the standard
of the Scholastic summa. The distinction between theology and phi-
losophy remained foreign to him; both knowledge and revelation were
elements of a homogeneous truth. He named these elements, for the
first time in a positive sense, dogmata [dogmas].
The term was burdened by the Stoic assumption that philosophical
schools were distinguished by their dogmas, and that their dogmatic
character was their mutual exclusiveness, their refusal to be arranged
in a systematic totality. Consequently a new and unique distinction is
called for, the distinction between ecclesia [church] and secta [sects]-
between something that is meant and allowed to exist only in the
singular, and something that was or was supposed to be engaged in
continual splitting off and scattering. The center was defined by what
occurred on the margins and borders. Who would be the Church was
determined by who gained the defining power- in alliance, as well,
with the power of the state- to declare others to be schools [i.e., 'sects']'
Marcion had been the first to recognize this and had laid claim to the
designa~ion of ecclesia for his followers. When the emperors Gratian
and Theodosius took the matter in hand, in 381, both the Marcionites
and the other heretics were forbidden to designate themselves as
"churches," as well as to use the Church's terms for ecclesiastical
offices. 23 In the twelfth anathema of the Fifth Council, the worst ac-
cusation against the reprehensible Theodore of Mopsuestia is that he
not only compared Christ to Plato and the Manichaean, as well as
Epicurus and Marcion, but also compared the "dogmatic" character
of the relation between teacher and school in the former and the latter
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Chapter 3
cases, according to which each of these teachers invented his own

dogma (oikeion dogma), and his students assigned themselves the name
of their teacher on account of their relation to that dogma: "simili
modo et cum Christus dogma invenisset, ex ipso Christianos vocari. "24
In this conciliar text the word dogma stands precisely in the almost
historiographical sense that had been established in Stoicism. In this
connection there was always a resonance from the fact that the Greek
word was translated by the Latin decretum [decree, doctrine], in which
one could hear an emphasis on the derivation from the language of
law, the quality of being established, historically, by 'edict.' Augustine
uses the Greek word with the Platonic contempt for its roots in dokein
[to think, to appear] and doxa [opinion]: "dogmata sunt placita sectarum"
[dogmas are the maxims of sects]. 25
That which has become the subject of the discipline of the history
of dogma is unthinkable without adding a dose of historicism to the
concept of dogma, which is why it was only in the nineteenth century
that the subject manifested itself under this title. But the late, histo-
riographical use of the concept does not prevent it from being the
case that the propositions and systems of propositions that were focused
on in this way were already present, as a mode of thought, behind
these facts and as their basis: It is only people's identifying themselves
as belonging to a community by accepting certain propositions and
excluding others that makes these propositions into dogmas. The read-
iness to express oneself in them does not constitute the doglnatic
mode of thought any more than the 'symbols' (symbola fidei)i-by which
people recognize one another and allow themselves to be recognized,
without their containing the entire substance of devout behavior-
first established the symbolic mode of thought. They contain what
everyone must continually acknowledge faith in, but not everything
against which one is not permitted to offend by other assertions; that
is the difference between 'symbol' and dogma.
The statement that myth had no adherents was meant to make
visible its characteristic form of freedom, which it owes to a forgoing
of truth. Nietzsche formulated it this way: "The old Greeks \vithout
a nornlative theology: Everyone has the right to contribute, poetically
[das Recht, daran zu dichten], and he can believe whatever he likes. "2(i
Burckhardt gives as the almost exclusive reason for this privilege the
fact that the earliest, "sometimes grotesquely frightful notions of the
gods' personality and myth" had not been retained, because the in-
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Part II
stitution that could have retained them, the influence of cult func-
tionaries, was absent. "Greek religion would read differently from
beginning to end if a priesthood had had influence over it ... the epic
poetry, as a whole, would have become impossible. "27 But Burckhardt
too takes up the attractive old mistake according to which myth, in
the version in which it entered the tradition, came from the original
period of the Greeks. That is the only reason why he is able to coin
the phrase, in the very first section (on "The Greeks and Their Myth")
of his Cultural History ojGreece, that "with their myth they had defended
their youth. "28 This statement is contradicted by his later insight that
the most original form of myth had contained grotesque and frightful
elements and that these elements would not have been overcome if
an institution had watched over the cult. The overcoming, which cel-
ebrates its triumph in poetry, came later; what is defended in it is not
youth. The young Epicurus, preparing to evict the gods from the kosmoi
into the metakosmia [from the cosmoses into the spaces between them],
and thus both to terminate myth and to complete it, still learns from
the Democritean Nausiphanes the one maxim of his life: "Don't let
yourself be frightened!"
Myth was able to leave behind the old terrors, as monsters that
had been vanquished, because it did not need these fears as means
to protect a truth or a law. The single institution that sustained it was
not aimed at alarming and frightening its public, but rather, on the
contrary, at bringing forward the terror, tamed, as a liberating insurance
of more beautiful things. The role of the rhapsodists was neither to
treat the terrible objects as real nor to let them be entirely forgotten.
Their audience's satisfaction depended on the reliability of the distance
contained in the statement that even Odysseus had made it home.
He had traversed the entire landscape of possible dangers and terrors,
had tested the durability of the system of the separation of powers
under stress. That is what everyone had wanted to hear again and
again in the epics and, before that, in the forms from which they
developed.
This proposition is not contradicted when Burckhardt says that the
difficulty, for us, of understanding Greek myth is the result of the fact
that the Greek people themselves "evidently wanted to forget the
original meanings of the figures and proceedings. "29 But it was precisely
only the 'original meanings' that they wanted to forget, certainly not
what they had been domesticated into in myth - the gods, that is,
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Chapter 3
with whom "one could live," because they "were subject to fate just
as much as men were, did not want to be more moral than men, and
did not provoke them to disobedience by the holiness that belongs to
the God of the monotheistic religions." The statement that Zeus and
the other gods, according to another of Burckhardt's formulations,
had "never recovered from Homer" can be taken literally only if one
assumes that the "dominion of poetry over every conception of the
gods" is a constitutive weakness of the Greeks' relation to the powers
above them, because that relation is deficient in the binding force and
the submission that are characteristic of authentic religion.
From the point of view of historical influence, the reverse formulation
would be at least as justified, according to which it was Homer and
Hesiod who first gave their gods historical durability, resistance to the
process of erosion. In spite of his freedom from theological bias, Burck-
hardt finds something lacking in myth that only became familiar and
alnl0st normative for him as a result of a history that was deeply
affected by dogma: a form of definition of the religious material, its
modality as something decided, and a sanction against poetic frivolity
and informal dealings with it. He finds this missing with the amazement
of a historian who declines to be a philosopher but has absorbed
philosophy as the epitome of prohibitions of frivolity.
The way the terms truth and lie are used has important consequences
for every way of understanding myth. Burckhardt's Cultural History is
distinguished by the fact that it gives up the connection, deriving from
the Enlightenment, between myth and the trickery of priests, but does
not seek any new connection between myth and a concept <?f truth
having a dignity higher than that of theory. Nietzsche, on the other
hand, wants to force a revaluation of the term lie, so as to strike at
the moralism of the duty of truthfulness by henceforth allowing talk
of the "beauty and gracefulness of the lie." What used to be called
the trickery of priests has become a sort of artistic activity: "Thus the
priest invents myths of his gods: It vindicates their nobility." It is
difficult - but the philosopher seeks to require nothing froIn himself
and others that is not difficult- "to revive for oneself myth's feeling
for the free lie." The legitimation of this is, adlnittedly, that of the
classical philosophy of history according to which the origin of phi-
losophy itself was made possible by the freedom of Inyth. The greatness
of the Greek thinkers results from the fact that they still live "entirely
in this condition in which they are entitled to lie." Nietzsche did not
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see the original situation of early philosophy, with and after myth, as
an initial and portentous relation to truth, but rather as a sheer lack
of truth - and as the right that results from this: "Where one cannot
know anything true, one is permitted to lie. "30
Though the formulation may be aggressive in its immoralism, still
it merely describes as "permitted" what occurs in any case when
people are embarrassed for lack of truth or of truths - even in cases
of proclaimed resignation: Vacancies are always filled. Everything that
dogma requires, myth exempts people from. It requires no decisions
and no conversions, knows no apostates and no repentance. It permits
identity even when it is deformed to the point of unrecognizability,
indeed even in the effort to bring it to an end.
The conversio [conversion] is the antithesis of a mythical event. It
must be strictly dated, historically, and datability is in fact a charac-
teristic of the classical instances in which it is attested. It is remarkable
in how many biographies of philosophers and other theoreticians the
point in time can be specified at which the new truth gained its adept,
who-according to Wilhelm Ostwald's description of his discovery of
the "energy imperative" - "suddenly had to stand still, and had the
almost physical sensation that is caused by an umbrella turning inside
out in a gale." I have intentionally picked an author who is capable
of banality and shuns lofty ideas. Long after it ceases to be possible
to appeal to illumination and inspiration, the anecdotally understated
'shock' that signals one's being struck by evidence remains obligatory.
Adherents to a 'truth' demand that its founder or discoverer, since
there are no other stories left for hiln to tell, be able to tell at least
the one story of how it struck him and divided the continuum of a
life into two parts, creating the zero-point situation from which a
horizon of new possibilities opened up.
The Sigmund Freud Society in Vienna was able, in January 1976,
to appeal for contributions for the construction of a monument to be
erected on the spot where Freud, according to his own account, had
gotten onto the track of the secret of dreams, on July 24, 1895. He
writes this five years later, on June 12, 1900, to Wilhelm Fliess. Amaz-
ingly, he says nothing on this subject in the letter that he had written
to the same addressee on the day the secret was discovered. Nietzsche
was "overcome" by the idea of eternal recurrence in August 1881 by
the lake of Silvaplana. It was the idea of the renewal of myth as, at
the saIne time, the final and sole truth, the truth that made man
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Chapter 3
absolute. It happened like an epiphany, in an act of momentary evi-

dence. Dated events include: Descartes's turning to the idea of method,
on November 10, 1619, as well as Pascal's memorandum of his aban-
donment of the idea of method, on November 23, 1654; Rousseau's
momentous idea on the way to Vincennes, as well as Husserl's discovery
of the a priori correlation; Kant's great light in 1769; Goethe's discovery
of the Urpflanze [original or archetypal plant]; William James's turning
point resulting from the reading of the essays of Renouvier on April
30, 1870; Gibbon's decision to write the history of the downfall of
Rome; and Valery's renunciation of aesthetic production. In brief, the
conceptual history of conversio unfortunately ends where the name of
the concept is no longer used, where even the pleasure taken in
rhetorical secularization is past-because one hesitates to lay claim to
any other legitimation than that of authentic confrontation with the
X whose tum it now is to legitimate.
For Nietzsche, the early idea of the beauty of the lie is refuted
almost automatically by the experience, hardly a decade later, at
Silva plana, of the most beautiful of the beautiful lies confronting him
like one of the despised old truths. It presents itself like these in that
it presses toward the 'seriousness' of the capacity for proof, the 'ac-
complishment' of making man absolutely responsible-man who is
supposed to take responsibility for all the worlds rather than just for
one, and who learns from this what it means to philosophize with a
hammer. k To the extent that it is burdened with the capacity to provide
a transition to the superman, the no longer beautiful lie of eternal
recurrence loses more beauty. Nietzsche would have liked best to prove
it by means of a study of physics. In that case the recurrence of at
least this one element, the truth, would have been complete, even if
since Zarathustra it was called soothsaying [Wahrsagung, literally "truth
saying"] and had acquired all the marks of the pressure of selection.
Not to satirize such a recurrence of the truth is difficult. To that
end one must also pay closer attention to the service that the myth
of eternal recurrence had to perform within the compound of
Nietzsche's philosophy. It is unmistakably meant as the final opposing
idea to Christianity, to Christianity's central massif: The recurrence
of the same makes each passage through the cycle a matter of in-
difference once its pattern has been decided; the realisln of Christology,
however, had distinguished the one world as the only one. This \vas
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the only possible point of God's monstrous effort in both sacrificing

and accepting the sacrifice of his own Son.
In the New Testament, eschatology had changed from being an
idea of the cyclical incineration and renewal of the world to being the
entirely different signal, understandable from the story of the Passion,
whose import was: No longer this world, and never again a world!
To conceive another world that would demand the utmost of God in
order for him to keep it to his purpose appears as the epitome of all
blasphemy. In the world cycles of eternal recurrence no absolute event
like this is conceivable-or, to put it differently, every event would
be like it. The seriousness of the idea consists in the fact that what is
repeated is what has been decided, once, by man. In that way action
becomes creation; the one history for which man is responsible decides
for all the histories, the one willed reality decides about the inclusion
or exclusion of all possibilities.
No matter how paradoxical this may sound as applied to Nietzsche,
the idea of recurrence formally combines the realism of Christian
dogma with one of the categories of myth, that of circumstantiality.
It is pure-the purest possible-circumstantiality to make the world
repeat its history eternally so as to get man in the world - if only in
the dimension of the superman-to some extent under discipline, to
force him or even only to persuade him to function as the custodian
of existence. For rhetoric is the essence of Nietzsche's philosophy.
There had been a formula for the medieval God that was supposed
to set his majesty against the claim of reason, to defend theological
abundance against anthropological poverty: God can bring about by
means of many things what could also have been brought about by
means of few. 31 Note well that this principle does not assert that he
must proceed in a circumstantial manner, because, perhaps, he is ig-
norant or incapable of simplicity; it only asserts that the idea of simplicity
is not the triumph of the spirit, but only the finite intellect's defense
against the demands of the infinite intellect. Theoretical reason cannot
rely on God's sharing the preference for simplicity that is forced upon
it, or even on his taking it into account. Conversely, the concept of
the potentia absoluta [absolute power] is the corrective against tying
God's will to the procedural order of the actual cosmos. It involves
the principle-which finished off the Middle Ages-of immediacy,
which is in fact the developed consequence of the dogmatic style, in
contrast to the mythical style of circumstantiality. Man cannot afford
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the former God any more than he can afford the latter. I He could
neither desire nor invent him; therefore, he exists, because he con-
tradicts man's desires.
The idea of recurrence applies the principle of abundance to the
world once again, as its means of coercing man: Weare not supposed
to be able to afford to reckon only on transience when everything
perpetually recurs. Mythical circumstantiality as a means of diminishing
the absolutism of the powers has become the circumstantiality of the
world. Directed against man as a world-simplifying creature, it gen-
erates an extreme pressure in the direction of the superman, who
alone would be a match for this condition of existence. God had
treated himself to abundance because infinity contains no economy
of constraints. A similar situation is now supposed to hold for man,
if no consideration needs to be given to morality - and as a sign that
no consideration has been given to it, as the stigma of the grand scale
of amorality. The repetition of the same must be justified by the quality
of the unique world that becomes its eidos [form, pattern]. This is
accomplished only by one who has passed the "great test" of which
Nietzsche speaks: "Who can endure the idea of eternal recurrence?"
In view of its fundamental 'givens,' the dogmatic mode of thought
finds it necessary to develop secondary rationalizations of circum-
stantiality: After the story has been told once, it is necessary to find
the formula that spells out what reasons and what purposes the com-
ponent actions are to be associated with. To prevent readers from
immediately thinking of Christology here, let me refer first of all to
the concise formula that the Jewish philosopher of religion, Franz
Rosenzweig, found for the difference between myth and the Bible:
The former deals with the "side leaps" [or "escapades": Seitenspriinge]
of divinity, the latter with its "paths. "32 Paths [Wege], as a counter-
metaphor to side leaps, do not exclude detours [Umwege]; nevertheless,
dogmatic rationality tends toward the possibility of giving reasons.
The idea of recurrence is dogmatic to the extent that it sees in man
the sole and sufficient reason for the quality of the world - it is a more
pointed version of the model of responsibility for the world that was
invented by Augustine, but without the purpose of serving as a theodicy.
Nietzsche's thought was very consistent in giving maximal extension
to the world's reality as a way of expressing its godlessness. The
theological attribute of omnipotence had been opposed to the circum-
stantiality of the course of the world, to extension, because omnipotence
Part II
permits anything to be done in a point; thought through all the way,

it makes superfluous even the mere existence of the world, which it
was invented to be the power underlying. For it would be possible to
supply each subject with its final destiny, as between bliss and the
opposite, by immediate decree at the moment of its origin. So the
world is circumstantiality in nuce [in a nutshell]. Through circumstan-
tiality, it becomes the history of man, including that of his meeting
with salvation as a result of sin and redemption. That God, in order
to save man and to reconcile him with himself, should need not only
a 'fixed procedure' but a painful one and one involving death is
incomprehensible on the assumption of his absolute power. It can only
be associated with the principle of circumstantiality as a stimulus to
the fides quia absurdum [faith because it is absurd]. m The idea of eternal
recurrence brings the mythical pattern of circumstantiality back into
rationality, by inventing a function for it in the assignment of meaning
to history.
All demands for the giving of reasons culminate in the question of
the reason for existence [Seinsgrundfrage]. All the claims that can be
set up following the principle of sufficient reason converge on it. If
the fact that there is a world is supposed to be understood as contingent,
as the result of a decision that could also have gone the other way,
so that then nothingness would have been preserved, as opposed to
existence, and if this decision is supposed to be represented as a
rational, perhaps even an ethical one, then it must be possible to
defend with reasons the fact that anything at all does exist, rather
than nothing. Leibniz's best of all possible worlds is not by any means
a sufficient reason for this, for even the best of what is possible could
be cut out if it were established that it was still not good enough to
overcome the superiority of nothingness. Nietzsche's idea of recurrence
defends existence by the simple da capo [Again, from the beginning!],
the assertion of a model's deserving to be repeated, that would have
resulted from the superman's responsibility for it. The superman is
in fact definable by the fact that he accepts responsibility, in absolute
seriousness, for the history of the world as something repeatable.
So an objection had to be admitted that the theological salvation
story could not possibly have withstood. The rationalization of that
story has to stop short of the final petulance of the question whether
it would not have been more reasonable not to create, in the first
place, a world and a man who would put their author in such difficulties
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for both his justice and his kindness. Since the metaphysicians of
Christianity unanimously assure us that its God could never be forced,
or be motivated by a lack, to emerge from his eternal solitude and
originate something that was not simply himself again, it must be
assumed that the Creation could not change anything for the Creator.
In contrast to Nietzsche's author of the model to be repeated in the
eternal recurrence of the same, the biblical creator God was the same
God who at any time could put a final end to the history that threatened
to miscarry in a way so disagreeable to him. But the logic of the
Christian dogmatics is just this, that instead of doing that, God involves
himself more and more deeply, and in the end definitively, in this
history - that he mixes himself up with it just as realistically and
inextricably as man the doer does in the idea of eternal recurrence.
The contradiction between the Incarnation and eschatology had been
that the latter was supposed to have promised, in spite of the former,
to make an immediate end to history.
The culminating question of the metaphysical tradition, Leibniz's
"Cur aliquid potius quam nihil?" [Why something rather than nothing?],
could never be answered. Nietzsche's idea of recurrence 'reoccupies'
the position of this question with a myth. Nietzsche did not need to
go into the question whether any world at all had a right to exist;
instead, he replaced the question with the postulate that all the sub-
sequent worlds in the endless sequence of eternal recurrence would
still have their right to exist founded in this one. For Nietzsche, man
has to exist because the quality of the world, for all of its cycles,
depends exclusively on him. But had man also had to exist in a world
whose Creator was supposed to have produced it for his own glory?
If one assumes that the world would have been suited, even without
man, to increase the glory of its author in the eyes of a heavenly
audience, then the question arises why man had to exist-indeed,
whether he should have been allowed to exist. If in spite of the quality
of the world, in spite of the preparation of Paradise to meet his needs,
in spite of the final dispatching of the Son of Man for his redelnption,
the terrible preponderance of the massa damnata [condemned mass]
still remained - was there still a justification for this creature? The
question is not posed outside all history and all consistency with the
pre-given norm of questions. For it had to be ans\vered, In ore or less
explicitly, in the Christian system, together with the central question
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why God became man, why he had, in (for the first time) complete
realism, to be "true God and true man."
Cur deus homo [Why God became man] is the title of the work-
paradigmatic for the fundamental attitude of the whole of medieval
Scholasticism-of Anselm of Canterbury. One would surmise that this
question would have been frequently posed and answered in the mil-
lennium since the saving events of Christian history. Astonishingly,
this is not the case. A new type of systematic unfolding of problems
comes on the scene with this work. Anselm, the inventor of the famous
proof of God's existence-philosophically, simply the limiting case of
such proofs - makes it evident that he can answer his core theological
question only if the question of the reason for the creation of man
can also be answered. That would be the only way to deduce God's
interest in this creature. That interest consists, to put it briefly, in the
fact that after the fall of Lucifer and his followers, the number of
angels foreseen, in God's divine plan, to constitute his eternal choir
of jubilation had to be brought up again to the status quo ante [to their
prior state], and that this was supposed to occur through the promotion
of men who had been tested in blamelessness. 33
Such statements, in their exotic medieval humility, have often been
marveled at. The enormity that the expense and the annoyance of
the whole history of men should be nothing but the unavailing attempt
to bring eternity's royal household back to its old splendor is almost
forgotten in the face of this fountain of inexhaustible imagination.
Respect for the beauty of the narrative invention silences the question
for what purpose God, to whom the fullness of all fulfillments in
himself and, in addition, the Trinitarian generation [of the Son] and
'spiration' [of the Holy Spirit], as internal processes, were ascribed,
had to maintain such choirs of jubilation in the first place. And why
the God who had been able to create the angels to fill up his band
once, without human additions, could not simply create new angels
to replace the fallen ones. Facing the importunity of such questions,
one becomes immediately aware that one stands at the watershed
between rnyth and dogma, between the world of images and Scho-
lasticism, and that the Christological treatise itself contains the con-
tradiction that it deals with the stories by means of the secondary
rationalization that they are answers to questions, but without per-
mitting further questioning.
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The myth just did not need to allow itself to be asked why it was
that eternity's planning had risked the adventure of using men for
replacements instead of new angels. It only needed to direct attention
to the intolerable gap in the ranks of the jubilating choirs to make
the story follow that here something had to happen, with complete
circumstantiality, to remedy that. Again, it is mythical for a story, as
the last one, to keep the view toward further matters - toward abysses,
the edge of the world, what cannot be interrogated-engaged, and
to keep its listeners breathlessly occupied with all that ensues.
Once the price that consists in accepting the final story has been
paid, the dimension of the much admired logical consistency of me-
dieval deductions opens up. Their insuperable and untouchable premise
is God as a being who, for himself, is the only object of contemplation
and the absolute goal of the will. Once one has accepted this postulate,
it becomes almost a primal idea of aesthetics that music should be
the mode of self-reference in which the first (and, in the original inten-
tion, the only) creatures produced by the divinity are directed to that
divinity in their exclusive office. When the absolute power is not able
to achieve its ends, the shadow of revocation falls on its undertaking;
to save, from the catastrophe of its breaking off, at least those who
remained or became suited to the original aim is then only a coming
to terms with the failure. In the end something must be done with
men that had not been done with the angels after Lucifer's fall: What
has proved unsuccessful must nevertheless be saved and recovered for
the original purpose - though only to the extent required by this purpose.
Fortunately I do not have to reach any conclusion here about whether
this story deserves the admiration that it has met with. But what was
to regulate the medieval system fundamentally is already manifest
here at the beginning of the Scholastic formation: unrestrained com-
pliance with the need to ask more and to credit oneself with more
answers than could even merely have been suspected in the documents
of the foundation of Christianity. In addition, as a burden taken over
from ancient metaphyics, there is the prohibition against making man
the purpose served by the world, because only God, and thus the part
of the \vorld that is related to him directly, could be that.
It is almost incomprehensible that a man like Anselm obeys this
prohibition. He has the highest expression of the fact that man is this
purpose of the world continually before him, because his \vhole at-
tention, in his speculation, is directed at the fact that God had taken
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on this nature and no other. But he take,s over still another ancient
assumption, the assumption that the number makes no difference to
the essence. The individual is only the multiplication of the essence
in a manner conditioned by matter. The result of this is that mankind's
natural increase in number stands in no relation to its background
function of entering the heavenly choirs as a replacement. At this
point the suspicion arises that there might be an accidental surplus,
which would inevitably lead to the massa damnata and would make
the divinity's will to salvation fail to be credible for mankind as a
whole, because it would be without a function.
If the number of men who had to be promoted to the ranks of the
angel choirs had remained indefinite, then, arguing backward, the
original constitution of this sounding body would have lacked the
perfection of a number that followed necessarily from its task. Anselm
experiences a bit of the Gnostic's dilemma in that he has to reduce
the perfection of the Creation so as not to diminish the magnitude of
the Redemption. Cautiously, he decides that the creation (prior to the
world) of the angels was not a perfectus numerus [final or perfect number].
Although he cannot avoid its being the case that man came into the
picture only as a solution to the problem of replacing the devil, he
can still waive the tightest possible nexus and gain the space within
which a human history is in fact allowed to take place. The lack of
personnel in heaven, the instantaneous necessity of man for God's
gloria, was lessened if the original number was not sheer necessity.
In the instance of Anselm's treatise, a limiting value of dogmatic
discipline picks itself out that implicitly runs counter to the question
of the reason for existence. God could only have kept his identity, as
the normal realization of his attributes, if he had entirely forgone the
Creation. To put it differently: What supervenes on his autarky eo ipso
[by that very fact] becomes myth.
The archbishop of Canterbury and primate of England who wrote
this treatise during a temporary exile indirectly demonstrates the dis-
satisfaction of his age with the Christological dogmatics that had been
practically concluded for more than half a millennium. In this eleventh
century, after all, the debate is no longer about the 'hypostatic union'
of two natures in one person, but about their cooperation in the
'spiration' of the Holy Spirit. Anselm does not work on the refinement
of the concepts and the consolidation of the system with the means
of ancient metaphysics. Instead of unflinchingly making God think
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himself, as Scholastic Aristotelianism, drawing on the Metaphysics, will

do, Anselm tells something like the 'prehistory' of man. In the process
he makes man into an unforeseen constitutive part of the story of
God's dealing with himself.
Anyone looking for a fundamental myth for medieval Scholasticism
and its concerns about divine majesty and autarky has its completed
schematics before him in Anselm's speculation. This is not a case of
an inadequate intelligence avoiding stricter methodical demands; An-
selm demonstrated what he was capable of in this respect with his
'ontological argument,' which occupied posterity as nothing else has
done. This argument was to charm even the despisers of Scholasticism
into its deserved admiration, because the profundity of the idea, the
representation of ultimate philosophical longing and of the self-per-
fection of reason in the overestimation of concepts, hardly suffered
from its successful refutation. Anselm did not know that in its pretension
and its form, he had invented something like the 'ultin1ate thought'
of philosophical reason. 34
The relation between dogma and myth, reason and imagination,
can be exhibited, by the example of Anselm, as a quantitative one.
Faith is supposed to give more information, by virtue of the biblical
documents, the creeds, and the council decisions, than reason is able
to provide; but myth goes beyond even what can be gathered from
both sources taken together. This surplus is the story of God's dealing
with himself, the story of his gloria, as a precondition of the substantial
realism of the Incarnation. Anselm definitively replaces the Gnostic
fundamental myth of the purchase of men's freedom from the custody
of the world ruler with the new fundamental rnyth of the infinite
atonement made to the Father by the Son. Only in the fourteenth
century did this tum into dogmatic definitions, as the final stage of
the process of 'secondary rationalization.' It is no longer a matter of
canceling Satan's legal relation to man by paying a debt, and rees-
tablishing the prior situation, but rather of expiating the insult done
to God by the privileged creature that he intended as a replacement
for the angels.
As long as, through a transaction with Satan, his legal po\ver of
disposition over man was to be put out of effect, the mythical category
of cunning-even without the extreme of docetism-continued to
dominate the bargain leading to man's salvation. Once the necessity
of man for God and his gloria could be established in a new ,va y, and
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God had become the sole addressee in the process leading to the
pardoning of man, the postulate of strict realism applied: the equiv-
alence, in substance, of the infinity of the insult, on the one hand,
and the infinity of atonement on the other-down to the last detail
in the interpretation of this story. It had now become possible to
explain why God's design (not only for man, but for himself) could
not be reestablished by any offering that was less than or different
from precisely this passion and this death of his own Son. In transactions
with the devil there could not be any logic of equivalence, but in
transactions with God equivalence had to govern everything. Anselm
made this equation obligatory for the subsequent history of theology.
However amazing it may sound, the new fundamental myth permits
Anselm's language to enter the modality of necessity. The purpose of
his treatise is not only, through the dogma of the Incarnation, to show
God's goodness to man but also to show the simple inevitability, for
the will to salvation, of this one solution. 35 Consequently he can promise
the reader more than the "credo ut intelligam" [I believe so that I
may understand].o He also promises him joy from eontemplation° of
the content of faith, a contemplation that the treatise will make possible
for him. Fides, intelleetus, and eontemplatio [faith, understanding, con-
templation] are the key words, at the very beginning, for this offer.
Here Anselm opposes the tendency toward the opposite of contem-
plation and 'intuition,'P which characterized the first great 'demy-
thologizing' effort carried out by the 'dialectical' wing of the theology
of his time.
Later on it became evident that there would be no successful, no
sufferable demythologization of Christianity. The tendency of dogma
is directed toward preserving something that is subject to attack or
temptation, which presupposes a world that is full, as we still (and
again) hear in Luther's song, of attack and temptation, if not of devils.
Anselm's fundamental myth, in contrast to this, seeks to establish a
definitive position on this side of gnosis. It is not for nothing and not
by accident that we hear of the delightful beautyG of the sought-after
explanation. What is sufficient, he says, has already been said by the
Fathers, but what fulfills has yet to be said-and this a full millennium
after the advent of salvation.
Finally, we need to flash back across this millennium again to the
scene of 'Paul on the Areopagus,' because this fiction already contains
all the problems of Christianity's (hardly voluntary) involvement with
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myth. While we see Anselm develop his fundamental myth out of

needs contained in the consolidated, but (for him) insufficiently 'intuitive'
dogma, Paul runs up against the almost unbroken front of myth as
it was absorbed in the state religion. Nothing is left for him but to
seek a gap for his god to break in through - to bow to the idea of
the pantheon, to make of the profusion of gods a totality, and to
provide for one who may still have remained unknown. His trick is
to make the last, not yet known and recognized god into the first-
and then immediately into the only one; and what is more, into the
only one who does not need to be worshiped with temples and altars,
and who excludes the veneration of images.
Through the supposed gap in myth, dogma forces its way. It defines
this God not only as the creator and lord of the world, but also as its
judge, who will execute his judgment through a man whom he caused
to rise from the dead. Paul does not quarrel with the philosophers'
God of the Attic schools, but enhances his role into that of the fulfiller
of an expectation that is inherent in every human heart. What matters
is no longer to avoid incurring the displeasure of any of the established
authorities in a system characterized by a separation of powers, but
rather to satisfy the conditions posed by the one and hitherto unknown
power that decides the fate of the world in accordance with justice.
All the legitimation of the one proclaimed by the apostle derives from
the overcoming of death. Not even his name is mentioned. Paul, in
this horizon rich in names, passes this name over in silence. Nothing
makes the fictional character of the scene clearer than this apostle
who passes over the name and does not appeal to what he had 'seen,'
although elsewhere the Christophany [epiphany of Christl is his absolute
legitimation.
He would have been able to derive the right to name that name
here from the construction with the aid of which he opposes the
division of mankind into Hellenes and barbarians: Everyone, he says,
descends from the same origin, so that it does not matter that the
Resurrection did not take place in Greece. This demand that his listeners
recognize a single history of a single inheritance from Adam may have
contributed to Paul's failure in Athens.
This attempt at breaking into myth has the character of dogma
because it consists solely of restrictions. The multiplicity of the gods
is reduced to the single, previously unknown God, the multiplicity of
peoples, in their circumscribed regions of habitation, are reduced to
Part II
a single extraction, and the diversity of the fates of individuals and

peoples is reduced to the single expectation of judgment. To the extent
that these reductions are carried out, who or what actually fills the
positions - the naming of names, reference to localities, testimony to
the proclamation of the Gospel-becomes unimportant. Paul presents
himself as one who, emancipated from his contingent circumstances,
transmits a universal message. The author of the apocryphal speech
does not make him say anything about justification through faith, but
about the world and mankind instead. 36
The element that is not invented, in fact probably could not have
been invented, in this seventeenth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles,
is the way Paul takes the dedicatory inscription, "To an unknown
god," as his rhetorical point of departure. What is an invention, and
at the same time gives more point to what is in any case a pointed
encounter between myth and dogma, is the use of the singular. For
the tradition is overwhelmingly to the effect that there were, in Greece,
altars dedicated to "unknown gods." Even Tertullian, the skillful de-
bater, twice mentions tha Athenian inscription in the plural: Ignotis
deis. 37 Tertullian had to be more cautious vis-a.-vis his readers, in dealing
with this single fact of the text, than the author of the Acts, who made
his hero 'demythologize' the Athenians' altar just as he did the proc-
lamation of an unknown god who after all was not merely what had
been missing, but the radical reversal of the relation between what
was included in the stock and what was missing.
The speech on the Areopagus says nothing about the Gospel; it is
a presentation of legitimations and relations of authority. The apoc-
alyptic principle, with which it confronts the cosmos-metaphysics that
originated and is predominant in this locality, derives its justification
from the Creation of the world and accredits the one to \vhom it
assigns the role of judging the world by his having risen from the
dead. But the speech does not relate anything about the two poles of
the biblical world.
The idea was not unfamiliar to the Greeks, from their myths, that
a man who was proven in life could be promoted to judge of the
dead. The inventor of the speech on the Areopagus was able to make
Paul allude to this when he had him conclude with the indication,
laconic in comparison to every form of apocalyptics: "Because God
had fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by
a man whom he has appointed, and of this man he has given assurance
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to all men by raising him from the dead." After all, this is spoken in
the place where Socrates has operated, for whom Plato, in his art
myth, had to develop the assurance of a moral justice going beyond
life because the Athenians had denied him this justice. Apart from
the accreditation by resurrection, Paul remains within the framework
of what that Socrates, in the Gorgias dialogue, is supposed to have
described by saying that the myth of the judgment of the dead counts
for him absolutely as logos. And, in the Phaedo, that in this matter it
is quite worthwhile to take the risk of believing that the matter really
stands this way, even if it may be a little different from the way it is
represented there.
So the first paradigm of the relation between myth and logos in
Christianity that we have before us precedes Christianity's reception
of metaphysical terminologies. The dogmatic mode of thought is not
bound to the means of definition employed by the patristic and Scho-
lastic authors and the Church councils, and did not come into existence
through them. Friedrich Theodor Vischer wrote in his "The Course
of My Life," in 1874, that his former study of theology had allowed
him to look behind the scenes and into the secrets of the Church and
of dogma. This, he says, is an advantage that cannot be entirely
replaced by any other type of scientific or worldly liberation of thought.
But the conclusion that he drew from this insight into the great arcana
needs to be tested: "Every dogma is a convolution of an idea, which
is a philosophical problem, and a bit of myth; the first component
gradually dissolves the second and sifts itself out. "38 For Paul's speech
in Athens at any rate, this formula does not generate an adequate
result.
If one tests it on another complicated state of affairs, that of the
dogma of Original Sin, then while one does encounter the reinforcing
element of the theodicy that is produced in order to combat Gnosticism
(reinforcing because it is combined with a new concept of freedom
and with the world-ruining guilt ascribed to it by Augustine and by
the Council of Carthage in 418), one cannot arrive at an understanding
of the earliest stratum [of this state of affairs], that of Paul's experience,
as a Pharisee, of the impossibility of complying with the La\\,. Why
was it not possible to comply with the Law? The answer to this question
could have something to do with the core of all the answers that have
been given, in philosophy, to the question why compliance with moral
standards becomes difficult for man: The finiteness of life, tending
Part II
toward death, prevents any patience in achieving our purposes while

having consideration for the purposes of others, for their possible
universality.
The first sin may have brought death into the world, but death had
to perpetuate sin in it. In that case the dogma of Original Sin is
originally part of the story of death's coming into the world. If one
cannot know that death is immanent in organic nature, then one can
tell the story of how the world's resistance to it was breached. Paul
would only have had to say, and perhaps actually intended to say,
that death came into the world through sin and consequently all had
sinned from that time onward. 39 The first part of the sentence would
have been mythical, the second rational, because it contains the in-
telligible explanation of the way in which the infinite will does not
put up with a finite life. The dominion of death would be something
in the condition of the world - the power that, once admitted, could
not be broken again-while the permanence of sin would only be a
secondary condition.
This path, that of expressing the inexplicable mythically and the
explicable as its intelligible consequence, was not taken by theological
dogmatics. The latter made the sin of one man immediately into the
inheritance of all, and took upon itself the difficulties of this requirement,
difficulties that reason could not tolerate, so as to substantiate the
unity of salvation more fully, or at least more obviously, with the help
of the unity of guilt. This example shows that the glimpse that Friedrich
Theodor Vischer thought he had had behind the scenes and into the
secrets of theology only reached the foreground. Dogma is not the
consuming of myth by the bit of philosophy that it also contains, but
is itself already a piece of remythicization of what, assuming a minimal
myth - in the sense of the Platonic relation of myth to logos - could
also have been brought about as insight into a conditioning relation.
The philosophical origin of or the prior imprint of philosophy on a
type of concept employed in dogma does not determine whether a
philosophical problem was also brought in, only in a different manner,
rather than the consequence of a prior commitment that could only
be narrated as a story.
It is not true, as one can observe in the cases of Plato, Paul, Origen,
or Anselm, that the disciplining of a system by philosophy or dogma
ends with the mythical 'residues' in it being consumed, as Vischer
claims to have discovered. On the contrary, the diffusion and acceptance
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of means of expression that are capable of definition increases the

demands made on the prior narrative 'givens' [Vorgabe], on the mythical
framework of beginning and end, basis and abyss [Grund und Abgrund].
The Christological dogma, with its gesture of warding off what could
not be demanded of its God, seems poor in content a millennium
later in comparison with Anselm's new fundamental myth. After all,
to make up for putting a stop to further inquiry he has provided,
initially, a comprehensive story of God's dealings with men, a story
that is not subject to the strict requirement of faith, but that has pushed
itself, like an iconostasis, in front of the ultimate unfathomables, and
restrains the mind from pressing forward with inquiry.
Philosophy, in opposition to myth, brought into the world above
all restless inquiry, and proclaimed its 'rationality' in the fact that it
did not shrink from any further question or from any logical conse-
quence of possible answers. Dogma restricted itself to ordering a halt
to the pleasure taken in questioning by those who transgress boundaries,
and marking out the minimum of what cannot be relinquished; that
is why, for example, the Roman Catholic church's late dogmatics
regarding Mary is quite atypical, even if it is not inconsistent. Myth
lets inquiry run up against the rampart of its images and stories: One
can ask for the next story- that is, for what happens next, if anything
happens next. Otherwise it starts over again from the beginning.
Flaubert noted in his Egyptian diary on June 12, 1850, that during
the day his group had climbed a mountain on the summit of which
there was a great number of large round stones that almost resembled
cannonballs. He was told that these had originally been melons, which
God had turned into stones. The story is over, the narrator is evidently
satisfied; but not the traveler, who has to ask for the reason why.
Because it pleased God, is the answer, and the story simply goes no
further. It is satisfied to pursue the uniformity of the stones, which is
contrary to the nature of accident, one step back, to a point where it
has to appear entirely 'natural.' Melons just grow that way, and there
is no need - in their case - for an explanation of why they look so
sirnilar and so uniform in size. Thus the introduction of the melons
helps one to accept a characteristic of the surprising stones that stones
do not in general and by their nature tend to have. It is a case of
falling back on the life-\vorld, on something that is falniliar in it, and
there is no thought that God would surely have to have some purpose
in dealing with the rnelons. This fragrnent of a rnyth takes only the
Part II
single step from the life-world to the untlsual, and then the story is
over. He who asks "Why?" is himself at fault if he is annoyed by the
answer. He has violated the rules of the game of the mythical world.
Nothing has been asked of him; on the contrary, he has been offered
something, something that in the face of the surprising facts can only
be a 'free gift.' Dogma refuses such offers, because it commands one
to believe its God to be capable of anything.
When, in Luke, the angel promises Mary the throne of David and
eternal kingship for her son Jesus, she asks the angel, as she has every
right to do, "How shall this be, seeing that I know not a man?" The
answer that she receives is the refusal of an answer, ending as it does
in the statement that with God, nothing is impossible. No alternative
is left but submission, since the rest of what the angel offers-being
overcome by the Holy Spirit and overshadowed by the dynamis [power]
of the Highest-is a filling up of the narrative emptiness with names,
with almost dogmatic abstractions that are slightly tinged, meta-
phorically, with copulation.
A statement like the one that in the beginning God created heaven
and earth does not do anything toward bringing this closer to our
comprehension; instead, it serves very well as a prelude to the non-
admission of further questions, with the risk of the anathematizing of
daring answers. Augustine, who gave the final formulation of the
doctrine of the creation from nothing, as opposed to the dualistic
conception that presupposes matter, nevertheless goes one step further.
He inquires after the reason for this creation: "Cur creavit caelum et
terram" [Why did God create heaven and earth?]. But the question is
not posed in order to give an answer, but rather in order simply to
discredit inquiry, or to displace it into the expectation of the same
pattern over and over again: "Quia voluit" [Because he wanted to].
The model represented by this formula of rejection - the substitution
of the will for reason, in the divinity-is the most momentous and,
in its further development, the most disastrous one for dogmatic ra-
tionalitv. The God who can do what he wants will want to do what
J
he can. At the end stands the infinite universe, which is God himself
over again, or simply God himself.
Such statements as that of the angel of the Annunciation to Mary,
in Luke, or Augustine's statement about the reason for the Creation,
are pure exclusions of any narrative license. They are already the
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Chapter 3
consummation of dogma-whatever may remain to be defined later

on - and are at the same time germs of its destruction.
During the history of its use, the sentence according to which in
the beginning God created heaven and earth has taken on the venerable
quality of unfathomable profundity. In actual fact, from the beginning
to the end we don't understand a single word of it. There is nothing
in this sentence that could have made the world more intelligible, or
even explicable, for us. I do not intend to investigate, here, what then
is the basis of its indisputable and unique effectiveness, which might
be summed up as the production of confidence in the world. Just
now, the point is to see the sentence as the elimination and blockage
of every story; one should not get the idea that insight into an unfamiliar
and mysterious process is being offered.
But if that is supposed to be the case, if the function of the sentence
is to impose requirements and categorical demands, then one will
wonder whether it is already the furthest that the will to concealment,
aimed at producing prostration, will go. I submit a variant form that
supplies clarity in relation to this consideration. It is the corresponding
sentence from the Gnostic system of Basilides, as reported by Hip-
polytus: "Thus the nonexistent God created a nonexistent world from
nonentities, casting and depositing one seed that contained a con-
glomeration of the seeds of the world. "40 This one sentence, with its
heaping up of negations, oversteps the boundary set by dogma's sug-
gestion of comprehensibility; it demonstrates the inaccessibility of the
origin that it asserts, and gambles away even the presupposition of
the creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing]. If one were to classify the
first part, one would assign it to mysticism. At the same time, though,
it provides evidence of the intolerability of the language of negative
theology and its function of creating submission, by unexpectedly
turning to a metaphor that seems to betray the beginning of a story,
or the presence of a story in the background. The dependent clause
that follows as a second part retracts the paradox, the exploding of
intention by means of negations; softens the strict prohibition of images;
and provides what, while it is indeed a primitive, is nevertheless a
familiar orienting pattern, one that is distributed worldwide in myths:
The world itself comes into being like what comes into being within
it, from an egg or from a seed.
What this myth involves can be effortlessly unfolded. One could
tell, further, what ground the grain of seed fell on, what \vaters fed
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Part II
it, and what sun shone upon it. In contrast, the first part of the doctrine
of the Creation is simply incapable of being continued. What more
could be said? God does not exist, the world does not exist, and what
the world was produced from is similarly, or even more, nonexistent.
If this is thought to be derived from the negations that are characteristic
of late Platonism, one only needs to compare it to the intuitive ac-
cessibility of the Platonic art myth of the demiurge, which is meant
to make the world transparent in its construction.
The sentence from the account of Basilides is a sort of formal
metaphor for the procedure by which a Gnostic system is produced:
A ceremonious conceptual iconoclasm is carried out, immediately after
which the overthrow and prohibition are extensively disregarded. In
addition, the pluralism of powers must be restored, which sets in
motion the telling of a story. In dogma, the One is offered as the
Ultimate; but stories cannot be told about it, unless it were a story of
how it ceased to be the One. The dilemma of the history of Christian
dogma lies in its having to define a Trinitarian God from the plurality
of which no license for myth is allowed to follow.
The generation of the Son and the 'spiration' of the Spirit may be
linkages-paled into metaphor-to biblical predicates, in the Trinitarian
dogma, which wards off relationships of subordination [between the
three Persons], but ultimately the Trinitarian God becomes more and
more similar to the Aristotelian unmoved mover, who intensifies his
autarky to the purest reality by executing even thought only as the
thought of himself The Trinitarian hypostases remain processes of
pure inwardness, and on account of the identical nature of the three
Persons - that is, their equal eternity - no story can be told, either, of
what led to this generation and spiration. Dogma, ha ving awakened
a need for myth, immediately summons it back to raison [reason].
How far from accidental such an unsettledness of the boundary
between dogma and myth is, is shown by the rabbinical conception
of intra divine dealings, a conception that permits no hypostases: God
prays to himself that his mercy may triumph over his severity.41 How-
ever fine the idea may be, instead of figures it makes, as it were, the
divinity's attributes negotiate with one another-compassion negoti-
ating with justice. What else should it mean to say that God prays to
himself? The story is not expanded, because in its function it is an
averting story, preventing myth by means of a tiny concession to it.
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Chapter 3
Translator's Notes
a. Paul Heyse (1830-1914) was a prolific German novelist and a comparatively unsuccessful
dramatist.
b. The kind of prohibition typified by the Second Commandment: "Thou shalt not make unto
thee any graven image .... "
c. That is, a nonrational process of making an arbitrary decision between alternatives; see
translator's note e to part 2, chapter 1.
d. Verblendungszusammenhange "delusion systems," an expression used by T. W. Adorno and

M. Horkheimer in their Dialektik der A1ifkla'rung (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947; Frankfurt: Fischer,
1969), p. 48 ("gesellschojtlicher Verblendungszusammenhang").
e. And the King James Version has "I AM THAT 1 AM" (Exodus 3: 14).
f. Gleichnisse "images," "comparisons," "similes," or "parables." English has no word with

quite the same breadth of meaning.
g. Eigentlich, which in the context of existentialism is translated as "authentic," has the more
general meaning of "proper," "true," "real," and thus of "properly" or "strictly" speaking,
of the "literal sense" of what is said, as opposed to metaphorical (uneigentlich) modes of speech
and meanings.
h. A 'metaphor' is literally a "carried-over" use of a term.
i. Der My thus des 20. Jahrhunderts (I 930) was written by Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi 'philosopher.'
j. The symbola fidei "symbols of faith" are the "creeds" stating Christian religious beliefs in
summary form.
k. How One Philosophizes with a Hammer is the subtitle of Nietzsche's Twilight if the Idols, written
in 1888.
l. The reference is to the God who can be 'circumstantial' and the God (of the potentia absoluta)
who can act immediately, without employing any intervening agency.
m. Compare Tertullian's famous "Credo quia absurdum" "} believe because it is absurd."
n. This is an apothegm coined by Anselm.
o. Anschauung. Like contemplatio, which the author translates with it here, A nschauung means
initially simple "regarding" or "viewing," which is then elevated into a quasi-visual "contem-
plation" or "intuition" of a tnlth. 1 have usually translated it, following the common practice
in philosophy, as "intuition," although this suggests a similar spread of meaning only to a
reader who understands its derivation (intueri, which has strong visual connotations, is very
close to contemplari), and in these contexts the meaning docs not have much to do with the
usual nontechnical sense of "intuition" as unusual, rationally inexplicable insight. The reader
must bear in mind the original visual connotation of the idea in order to appreciate its
association, in the author's discussion, with mythical 'imagery.'
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Part II
p. Anselm opposes die Tendenz. Z.UT Unanschaulichkeit. See the prevIous note on A nschauung
"intuition. "
q. "rationis pulchritudinem amabilis": CUT deus homo, Book 1, chapter 1, ed. F. S. Schmitt
(Munich: Kosel, 1956), p. 10.
4
To Bring Myth to an End
One more story and after that I shall bristle with x's and y's.
- Stendhal, Henry BruLard
In his discussion of myth Fontenelle expressed the Enlightenment's

amazement at the fact that the myths of the Greeks had still not
disappeared from the world. Religion and reason had, it is true, weaned
people from them, but poetry and painting had given them the means
by which to survive. They had known how to make themselves in-
dispensable to these arts. I This statement is meant as a contribution
to the history of human errors. Part of the program of the Cartesian
school was to remove this category too, together with the totality of
prejudices, from people's minds. The vigor of the myths must have
seemed all the harder to understand, since the explanation of the
tenacity of prejudices that described them as keeping themselves alive
by flattering man about his nature and his place in the universe, against
all his better knowledge, did not fit their case. Not only did Fontenelle
see a relationship of exclusion between the new science of nature and
the ancient myths; he also leaned toward the assumption that given
an appropriate presentation, science could fill the vacancy that had
arisen, in the system of needs, as a result of criticism of the myths.
No doubt he considered something along the lines of his Entretiens sur
La pLuraLiti des mondes [Conversations on the plurality of worlds] as
compensation for all the lost beauties of the tradition, in the destruction
of which he had participated so successfully, in the year in which the
Part II
conversations on the plurality of worlds ~ppeared, with the Histoire

des oracles [Story of the oracles (1686)J. This basic idea of'reoccupation'
had motivated Fontenelle's invention of the literary genre of the didactic
conversation for the Enlightenment-which did not consistently keep
in view the ulterior purpose that he had meant the genre to serve. 2
In the legend that the ancient oracles fell silent at the hour of Christ's
birth, Fontenelle sees only one of the tricks from the repertory of
deceptions practiced by priests. Since he has an opponent to whom
the historical truth is not a matter of indifference, the question of the
truth of the invention is too important to him, as well, to allow him
to enjoy its simple beauty and, at the same time, to see how the
elemental need to find significance in history is satisfied by the man-
ifestation of the mere form of simultaneity. Still, Fontenelle hesitates
to pursue the logic of his critique-which is definitely designed as an
indirect critique of Christianity-all the way. When the addressee of
his pamphlet, the Jesuit Balthus, replies, he does not read the diatribe
to the end, so as to avoid the temptation of a rejoinder. He writes to
Leclerc that rather than continue the polemic he would prefer that
the prophet in the oracles had after all been the devil, so that they
were forced to fall silent when God made his appearance in the world,
if that was what the Jesuit wanted. 3
Fontenelle accepts a presupposition of his opponents \vithout which
the legendary event would not be worth disputing about; he raises
the pagan myths and oracles to the level of comparable and conflicting
truths, historiographical assertions, equivalent contents of a 'belief,' in
order then to attack that pretension and in it, indirectly, to hit the
other partner in the comparison. This is why he also fails to comprehend
the protected status of the myths in the poetry and fine arts of his
time; he regards it almost as a cunning practiced by their contents,
in their endeavor to assert themselves, because their making themselves
so indispensable seems to him an inexplicable mystery. What remains
outside his comprehension is the fact that distance from the myths is
not first established when one believes that one can assure oneself of
their 'falsehood.' Distance pres~nts itself in the myths themselves as
the acceptance of 'significance.' Through it, they make themselves
available to the aesthetic reception, in such a way that they finally
appear as a particular category of that reception. Goethe will say:
"The Greek mythology, otherwise a confused jumble, can only be
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Chapter 4
regarded as the unfolding of the potential artistic themes that lay in

an object."4
That the relationship between the 'prejudice' called myth and the
new science should be one of competition necessarily presupposes the
interpretation of individual myths as etiological. This is why Fontenelle,
as the secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, could see a
triumph of the Enlightenment in the explanation of the nature of
'thunderbolts.' He had before him the overall state of 'convictions'
regarding the origin of these phenomena, convictions that he saw as
forming a single front alongside other constituent parts of consciousness,
so that when this one was hit, all the others seemed to be hit as well.
An explanation of the nature of the rainbow could be seen as a
refutation of the function of the biblical myth, if and as long as the
latter was viewed exclusively in its relationship to reason's need for
explanation, and the institutional character of its 'apotropaic' [ill-avert-
ing] function over against ancient fears of storms and floods remained
unnoticed.
The biblical text makes it evident that the God of the terrible flood
wanted to set up a sign of definitive distance, of the possibility of trust
in the world, when he spoke to his heart: "I will not again curse the
ground anymore for man's sake; for the imagination of man's heart
is evil from his youth; neither will 1 again smite any more every thing
living, as 1 have done." He gives those who have just escaped the
Flood a first specimen of the sequence of agreements and convenants
that were to characterize his dealings with his people: "This is the
token of the convenant which 1 make between me and you and every
living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: 1 do set my
bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between
me and the earth." One will not want to say that this is an 'explanation'
of the rainbow, which would have had to be replaced as quickly as
possible, with arrival at a higher level of knowledge, by a physical
theory. All that the theory accomplishes, after all, is that the phe-
nomenon, once it is seen through in this way, has lost its 'significance'
for man.
The point is not to lament this loss, but rather to oppose the historical
myth of the darkness out of which reason lighted its o\vn \vay only
when it was constituted as science. We enjoy the way the Romantic
landscape painter has again reclaimed the rainbo\v, for a different
kind of experience, from the insignificance assigned to it by the
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Part II
Enlightenment. Keeping the phenomenon ort the plane of narratability

or pictorializing has not been made superfluous by any degree of
theoretical lucidity, as can be seen more clearly in the case of histo-
riography than anywhere else: To keep the totality comprehensible
in the form of a 'pregnant' event, and not to let it be atomized in the
cloud of facts and circumstances, will always reassert itself as the
historian's task when the opposite has been asserted and presented
long enough.
Although history may appear as something that can be made and
that in its great events, with the nailing up of theses and with coro-
nations, is made, the reception embraces myth precisely as something
that cannot be made, as something that, because it could not be
invented, is without a beginning. However certa,in it is that myths
were made up, though we know no one who did it and no moment
at which it was done, this lack of knowledge nevertheless becomes
the index of the fact that they must belong to the stock of what is
primeval and that everything that we are acquainted with is myth
that has already entered into the process of reception. One must
already have the work of myth behind one in order to be able to
apply oneself to work on myth and to perceive it as the stimulus to
exertion directed at a material whose hardness and power of resistance
must have unfathomable origins. The limit concept of the work of
myth could be what I have called the absolutism of reality; the limit
concept of work on myth would be to bring myth to an end, to venture
the most extreme deformation, which only just allows or almost no
longer allows the original figure to be recognized. For the theory of
reception this would be the fiction of a final myth, that is, of a myth
that fully exploits, and exhausts, the form.
So as not to leave that standing as a mere riddle, I will add that
such a final myth could have been the fundamental myth of German
Idealism. Perhaps this will spring to the eye better if I introduce that
fundamental myth here with the words with which Schiller presented
it to Goethe. What he there communicates in a single sentence, from
Jena to Weimar, is an ironical abbreviated version of Fichte's first
proclamations after assuming his chair in J ena - and, it may be added,
only three years after his meeting with Kant: "To him the world is
only a ball that the ego has thrown and that it catches again in
'reftection'!!"5 How is it possible that in the midst of the success of
the modern age, of its program of the scientific destruction of all
myths whatever, a final fundamental myth-at least, one that was
meant to be final-arose?
The ultimate [or "final": letzter] myth was a consequence of the
ultimate doubt. Descartes had introduced the thought experiment of
the genius malignus [malicious spirit], not wantonly and not in the absence
of historical pressure, but still in the confidence that he would be able
to dispose of it with the aid of the concept of the ens perfectissimum
[most perfect being] as a guaranteeing authority whose existence could
be demonstrated. Leibniz already objected that a doubt that was this
radical could not be removed by any argument, and Kant's proof of
the impossibility of every type of proof of God's existence allowed
the naked edge of the doubt to continue its subversive existence. There
was only one means by which to remove this last monster from the
world, namely, for the cognitive subject to make itself into the authority
that is responsible for the object it knows. Thus Idealism'sa 'final myth'
is a way of establishing distance from a terror that is now only mental,
and now strikes deep only into the theoretical subject. Because to be
completely and thoroughly deceived is something that need not disturb
the subject of the life-world, as long as that subject can be sure that
it will never awaken, from the impermeable reality with which it has
had to deal so far, into an unknown one.
Seen from the perspective of Idealism's fundamental myth, the
malevolent demon of Cartesian doubt is the monster of a prior world
of terrors that are now definitively overcome. In the associated phi-
losophy of history, which establishes past states as definitively past,
the mythical prior world has its necessity for a future of which it may
be and is meant to be assumed that it has just become present. The
epistemological demon whom Descartes introduced was supposed to
be capable of doing something that, under the heading of "delusion,"
had been ascribed to the Greek gods as their part in tragedy. But
there, this veil had always been partial-also capable, in the inter-
weaving of the 'separation of powers,' of being pierced by means of
the favor of another god. In myth, the total and the definitive do not
occur; they are products of dogmatic abstraction. This is why the
fundamental myth of Idealism includes a philosophy of history. That
philosophy epitomizes the fact that God himself cannot do everything
at once, not even for himself The philosophy of history makes history
once again into a story, b one that deals with the original playful or
adventurous or shaping and organizing subject. It can no longer be
Part II
the most perfect being, in whom Descartes. had sought the guarantee
for the accessibility of the world for theory. For there could not be a
story about such a being; according to the classical definition of its
eternity, it was everything at once. But if the absolute finds its way
to itself only by way of the detour of time, its history does not 'befall'
it, it cannot alarm and appear strange to it; instead, it comes into the
horizon of its experience as something it has made. This experience
is, strictly speaking, an essentially aesthetic one.
In the winter of 1811 to 1812 in Berlin, Schopenhauer took notes
on Fichte's lectures and made a marginal notation in his notebook:
"I am trying to explain how this whole fairy tale arose in Fichte's
brain."6 His explanation is to the effect that Fichte must have mis-
understood Kant's doctrine, no doubt on account of its incompleteness.
Against Fichte's original 'given,' the Being that contemplates itself,
Schopenhauer notes the objection that while the ego can certainly be
contemplative, it can never itself be what is contemplated. The fun-
damental pattern of Fichte's doctrine of science was that the only way
in which one can come to know 'Being' [das NSeynJJ] was by its com-
municating and making itself understood. Schopenhauer comments:
"Isn't it pretty impudent [to assert] that the story of something that
no one knows anything about is supposed to be attested by the fact
that it comes from that same thing? In the same way rogues have
sold pieces of land that were supposed to be in America, after producing
maps of the land that were supposed to have been made on the spot."7
Now the description of absolute reflexiveness as contemplation is
only a provocation to the movement without which something simply
could not appear in a philosophy that must, however, appear in it
without fail: the subject's dissatisfaction with itself, as the precondition
of its willingness to have a world. Just three years later, Schopenhauer
discovers the invaluable advantage that Idealism's subject derives from
the fact that it need not allow itself to be frightened by the experience
of the world as lostness in infinite space and infinite time: In reflection
on myself as the subject of knowledge I become aware that "the worlds
are my representation, that is, that I, the eternal subject, am the bearer
of this universe, whose whole being is nothing but a relationship to
me." In this recognition there is summed up the whole feeling of
exaltation in which the horror and awe are dissolved that arise, for
our experience of the world, in view of the millenniums and "the
countless worlds in the sublilne heavens .... What has become of the
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Chapter 4
horror, of the dread? I am, nothing else exists; sustained by me, the
world reposes, in the repose that emanates from me: How should it
terrify me, how should its greatness amaze me, which is never anything
but the measure of my own greatness, a greatness that always surpasses
it!"8 So that is it: A story is told, about the world and about the subject
of its objects, that radically excludes the absolutism of reality. It is an
unprovable story, a story without witnesses, but a story with the highest
quality that philosophers have ever been able to offer: with irrefutability.
If we could agree on anything as counting against it, there would be
weight in the testimony of its beneficiary, to whom the assurance of
the world's favor, as his creation, loses credibility because of his overall
experience, with his 'creatures,' that his being their author does not
unequivocally guarantee their subservience to him.
If, in Idealism's fundamental myth, only the form of a myth is now
meant to be put into effect, with abstract names and in conscious
unsurpassability, then this myth has its point in the representation of
autogenesis, of the subject's self-production. By this means even the
primary condition of every possibility of reality is kept under the
subject's disposition, as though the subject did not want to let itself
be surprised by the quality of reality, not even by the fact that there
is anything at all, rather than nothing. One could describe this point
as the absolute dominion of the wish, of the pleasure principle, at the
opposite end of a history that must have begun with the absolute
dominion of reality, of the reality principle. Hence the observation,
which at first was disconcerting but could then be converted into an
affirmative one, that the creative and the neurotic imagination are
closely related to one another. Both would have withdrawn themselves
from the dominion of the reality principle.
The deepest conflict that the subject that reflects on its absolute
root can have with itself is the confirmation of its contingency in the
world, of its lack of necessity. Perhaps the father and mother conflicts
discovered by psychoanalysis and rediscovered in myth are only fore-
ground appearances, specific forms of the deeper conflict that consists
in or arises from the fact that a subject is a result of a physical process
and for that very reason does not experience its self-constitution, but
rather, from its possession of the sole absolute certainty of the cogito
sum [Descartes's "I think (therefore) I am"], gains access to this con-
stitution as something heterogeneous to it. From the account of an
analysis with Otto Rank we know how the most precise formulation
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Part II
of this dilemma looks: "You wanted to cr~ate yourself, you did not
want to be born of human parents .... You tried to live your life like
a myth. Everything you dreamed or fantasied, you carried out. You
are a myth maker."9 The neurotic indulges himself by allowing the
constellations and dependencies that he finds unpleasant to tum into
wishes, into wishes that create an illusion of still being able to make
changes in the actual realities, 'ex post facto.' This includes the wish
to have produced oneself. One stages oneself as though one had done
so.
The desire for absolute authenticity has also been systematically
expressed at the center of existentialism. Thrownness, jacticity - these
are abstract terms for the simple circumstance that contrary to his
wish to have given himself existence and the conditions of existence,
man finds these already present, as something produced by the most
down-to-earth process of nature, and has to define himself, in his self-
projection, over against nature's preconditions. The reversal of the
Scholastic axiom that existence follows essence, according to which
essence first arises from Dasein ['presence': Heidegger's term for (hu-
man) existence], means precisely this. This position appears, in ret-
rospect, as the final resistance to the overwhelming presumption that
one is produced by alien, social agencies - as the desperate effort to
resist this or to undo it ex post facto. It is not surprising that self-
production at bottom again and again winds up as an aesthetic trans-
action of self-presentation. It is only aesthetically that one can satisfy
the wish not to be the way one is. Even for Plotinus's God, self-
production was already a metaphor, which was meant to make his
existence a pure consequence of his essence, to suspend the Platonic
chorismos [the "separation" between form and matter, essence and
existence1 in the highest principle by representing his essence as the
epitome of his will. But this has also become the definition of the
aesthetic object. In contrast to everything 'given' [alles Faktische1, the
aesthetic object is the identity of conception and appearance - in other
words, the infallibility of the wish as reality.
For one myth to be distinguished as an ultimate and unsurpassable
pure representation of its 'form' is the highest stimulus to dealings
with the mythical, but is not a status that can be shown to be final.
Beginning and end are symmetrical also in that they escape demon-
strable tangibility. Myth has always already passed over into the process
of reception, and it remains in that process no matter what violence
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is applied in order to break its bonds and to establish its final form.
If it is present to us only in the forms of its reception, there is no
privilege of certain versions as more original or more final. Levi-Strauss
has proposed that we define an individual myth in terms of the totality
of its versions. Freud and Sophocles would then have to be regarded
equally as 'sources' in relation to the Oedipus material. All variants
could lay claim to the same mythological seriousness. lo The most
important consequence of this central thesis is the abandonment of
'histories of influence' ['Wirkungsgeschichte'l, in the strict sense, in my-
thology. The requirement of a spatial or temporal contact for the
'causal' nexus is given up. What is presupposed is more nearly a
continuous productivity than a receptivity that crosses gaps, because
fundamentally it is assumed that any significant individual myth could
become virulent, from the constant fundament of human nature, at
any time. Even where a process of reception can be documented as
having occurred, it can be argued that the disposition to such a reception
cannot be distinguished from the disposition to authentic authorship.
The ethnological material of widely distant cultures favors such a
hypothesis. If I nevertheless do not go along with it, it is to avoid the
inescapable Platonism that would finally have to be granted to every
tradition as a result of abandoning mechanisms of transmission. Then
the concept of tradition would enervate that of history, and finally
one would do nothing but point to the contents of a "black box" to
explain something that, while it does present itself as dispersed in
time, is as little affected by its position in time as the Platonic ideas
are by their appearances. But it is only the temporal definiteness of
the earlier and the later that makes it important that Apollo, originally
a "ruiner, "c becomes the beaming and friendly god; that Hephaestus,
from a god of the terrors of fire, becomes the patron of technical
skills; that the old storm-god Zeus becomes the world orderer; and
others too become different.
Nevertheless, the value of Levi-Strauss's central thesis is not set
aside if we hold fast to the concept and the process of reception,
indeed if we give it a unique role in mythology. It remains the case
that all versions are constitutive elements of the one myth, only the
irrelevance of their position in time as contrasted to their ideally si-
multaneous distribution in space is revalued into the priority of the
temporal mode of order. For that mode provides all the indications
of the part played by the variants in exploiting a potential that, without
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the differentiation of the deforming and e~riching assertion require-

ments in history, d would remain undisclosed. The same thing that is
accomplished for the ethnologist by the diversity of the cultures under
the preconditions of which the individual myth is produced and elab-
orated is accomplished in a continuous tradition like the European
one by what we have become accustomed to call historicity. It can
be expressed more simply as the impossibility of always speaking of
a given content, or of conceiving it as always being understood, in
the same way. The negation of this impossibility, in tum, is what is
alleged in the dogmatic mode of thought.
When Levi-Strauss proposes to project all the collected versions of
a myth in a layered structure, as a means of determining the core
contents, this is how he separates out the temporal factor: All variants
are assigned to an indeterminate temporal plane. It is no longer the
'eternal truth,' but it is still a truth for which the passage of time and
its position in time are matters of indifference. For a philosophical
mythology the especially hardened material of myth in its passage
through history is instructive not least because from its resistance to
the direction and the strength of deforming and destructive powers
we can gain information regarding the historical horizons from which
those forces impinge. This is why it is not a value preference placed
on European history, if it is almost exclusively in that history that the
passage of myths through tradition can be exhibited. Seen from the
perspective of this possibility, the ethnologist's ideal simultaneity ap-
pears as a mere difficulty resulting from a lack of temporal parameters.
His concept of time is marked by the structure of superimposition,
and in view of this the membership of all variants in one myth turns
out to be not a demand but a rationalized way of coming to terms
with a merely contingent state of deficiency. In one of the not un-
common professional revaluations, the impossibility of attaining a tem-
poral depth of focus becomes the triumph of cognitive accomplishment.
As such, it avoids the culture-circle theory's thesis of a constant
tradition-instead of a constant disposition-stemming from an already
culturally advanced center of mankind's spatial and temporal diffusion.
This thesis suffers today from the fact that the migrations and
physical differentiations had to be pushed back in time to earlier and
earlier phases and the protracted shared period of cultural development
that the theory required found less and less room in the temporal
scheme of prehistory. Also, the necessary corollary hypothesis seems
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not to be confirmed, which asserted that elements of primitive com-

monality should be found precisely where migrations into blind alleys
and places where peoples were pushed aside led to protection from
later influences and to conservation of what was archaic. This genetic
theory would in any case have been burdened with such an exaggerated
assumption of constancy in connection with the capacity of human
society to convey tradition that it was the equal of any structuralism
in its demand for 'historylessness.' Moreover, if everything was already
present in finished form, while it is true that there is nothing left for
the process of tradition to explain, everything is left to be explained
by the coming into existence of that original stock. It is not an accident
that the culture-circle theory has harmonized especially well with the
doctrine (which had already caught on, as applied to mythology, in
Romanticism) of an original revelation that is inherited in fragmentary
form but not understood. This rounding out of a genetic theory with
heterogeneous ideas compensates for the displacement of all problems
to the beginning of the history of mankind: The myth of Paradise
becomes indispensable once again.
The grand theoretical alternatives are of interest here only because
they also affect the setting of a limit to the reception [of myth] by
'bringing it to an end.' This idea remains unintelligible if myths, either
as anthropologically naturalized or a prehistorically determined, belong
to the groundwork of human culture and of the culture of mankind,
a groundwork for whose unity there is or is allowed to be no history.
Supposing that the central problem of mythology really is to under-
stand how it is that the constituents of myth resemble one another
so much from one end of the world to the other, then the fact that
they also remain stable in an amazing manner in the dimension of
time, from one end of human history to the other, cannot be any less
important. There is no law of cultural inertia; so explanations must
also be demanded for the continued persistence of cultural contents.
Perhaps the morphological comparability across the synchronic-spatial
diffusion of individual myths is even connected to their durability in
diachronic transport.
This would be the case if the stability of the narrative kernels were
based on a readiness to receive them that had to do not so much ''\lith
preformed and innate models as with the liInited multiplicity of those
hUInan circulnstances, needs, and situations that are reflected in
mythical configurations and that make these appear at least forInally
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similar. Assuming that spatial and tempor4l ubiquity are equivalent,

one is compelled to see the conditions of the reception of the mythical
as at least not heterogeneous to those of its origin. In this case, from
the perspective of the former, at least suppositions about innateness
would have to be excluded or put in doubt.
In both cases, in its worldwide as in its 'time-wide' correspondences,
myth shows mankind engaged in working up and [mentally] digesting
something that won't let it alone, that keeps it in a state of unease
and agitation. It can be reduced to the simple formula that the world
is not transparent for human beings, and they are not even transparent
for themselves. That does not yet mean that the explanation of phe-
nomena has always already had priority and that myths are something
like early ways of dealing with the difficulty of lacking theory. If they
were an expression of the lack of science or of prescientific explanation,
they would have been disposed of automatically at the latest when
science, with its increasing powers of accomplishment, made its en-
trance. The opposite was the case. Nothing surprised the promoters
of the Enlightenment more, and left them standing more incredulously
before the failure of what they thought were their ultimate exertions,
than the survival of the contemptible old stories - the continuation of
work on myth.
This work presupposes familiarity with what it is done to, not only
in those who perform it, but also in those who have to take it in,
receptively. It always presupposes a public that is able to respond to
the mechanism of reception. It must be able to recognize what has
been preserved, what has been deformed or made nearly unrecog-
nizable, and finally what has been subjected to the violence of reversal.
It is easy to say that this is the typical assumption of a public equipped
with a bourgeois, even a classical, but in any case a literary education.
That this cannot be correct one can infer from the circumstance, which
is not difficult to observe, that during the decades of the purposeful
destruction of the share of the classics in the educational system,
especially in the United States but also in Europe, the utilization and
variation of mythical materials in literature and the fine arts increased
to an undreamed-of extent. As a consequence of this phenomenon
many people were motivated to engage themselves with the ancient
world as an amateur interest, and publishers' series promoting it were
increasingly successful.
To take note of the role of the public in the process of receiving
myths is not a new thing. For the court theater in Weimar, in connection
with the production of August Wilhelm Schlegel's Ion, Goethe suggested
that one should kindly instruct oneself about the context at home
beforehand, with the aid of a handbook of mythology, and not insist
that the explanation be supplied along with the play: "One can show
the public no greater respect than by not treating it like rabble. "11
This sentence will remain true however the preconditions for supposed
'classicisms' and for the possibility of bringing them about may change.
Part of the aesthetic public's claim to be taken seriously lies in our
preserving the general expectation that it will 'note and notice some-
thing' [' etwas merken und bemerken '] that is not meant to be beaten and
lectured into it in the manner of naked didacticism. To do something
to oblige the public [i.e., for its sake] is not the same thing as to be
obliging to it.
Even when simply pronouncing names taken from myth, the actor-
again according to Goethe - must pay attention to the fact that they
are "important proper names, indeed names that portray the whole
meaning." This meaning can be made clear, he says, even if the
imagination can only be brought to represent to itself "something
analogous" to what they actually refer to. 12 That is a statement that
very much deserves to be pondered in connection with the function
of mythical names. The imagination has a chance of success, even if
no sound knowledge underlies it. For the names, taken by themselves,
the same thing holds that must be claimed in full for the stories: that
they possess a significance that in itself is capable of making an impres-
sion, and they can be appropriated, in this significance, without regard
to definable educational prerequisites. The impact on the imagination
can be ambiguous; it will do what one describes with the simplest
phrase: to occupy it.
The inexhaustibility of the mythical image becomes manifest in its
reception, but not in the manner of something simply being made
visible that may already have reposed, preformed, within it. It is a
real epigenesis. But it cannot be thought of as independent of its
continual point of departure, which, for a tradition that is dependent
on 'sources,' can no longer be anything but the final state, gone over
into written form, of an unknown oral prehistory. Even enrichment
through the process of reception, and accumulation of related materials,
indicate jumping-off points for connections, capacities for reference
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Part II
in the inherited and available material. A pr~condition for the Odysseus

in the Divina Commedia [Dante's Divine Comedy] was that, for Dante,
Homer was not inviolable, and the nonhomecoming of Aeneas, cul-
minating in the foundation of Rome, was incomparably more persuasive
than any cyclical significance of the path from Ithaca to Ithaca could
have been.
If a myth is to be brought to an end, because only by its application
to a myth can one convincingly demonstrate what this 'finalization'
demands and means, everything depends on the potential of signif-
icance that is unfolded or engendered in the process of reception.
Nothing has been so provocative aesthetically, and as criticism of the
age, as the test of strength carried out on the modem age's myth of
Doctor Faustus.
In the "preliminary version" of Butor and Pousseur's variable Faust
opera, Goethe's "Prologue in the Theater" has become the whole.
The refrain is the theater director's ambiguous mandate to the com-
poser, "It must be a Faust!" And, in fact, it cannot be anything else,
not because this figure was disposed from the beginning to be inex-
haustible' but because it became that as a result of its affinity to the
consciousness of the epoch. Only by being tested against it can new
forms of self-conception, if there have ever been such already or if
there should be yet, present themselves. By the fact that the prologue
becomes the whole, the endless evasion of realization in spite of the
recourse to puppet show and annual fair, to the "infamous life and
terrifying end of Doctor Faust," in the mythical environment of the
"torments of Tantalus, the vultures of Prometheus, the boulder of
Sisyphus," even of Judith and Holofemes, Samson and Delilah, David
and Goliath- in spite of this immersion in the medium of the origins,
it gets no further than the prologue, the exhibition of the impossibility
of imputing a Faust to this audience, conceived as capable of choice.
For the original situation of the testing of mythical songs is also
supposed to be realized again in that the decision about the authors'
offerings, about the progress and the end of the "variable play," lies
with the recipients. If one looks more closely, one does not fail to
observe that this aesthetic democracy has almost nothing to decide.
An anachronistic oral procedure is suggested, and its incisive effect is
simulated. Or should one say that the public is made the accomplice
in the flight from the task of a Faust: that it prevents the attainment
of that goal? Is it supposed to show that no contemporary public
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Chapter 4
would entertain this Votre Faust [Your Faust], because that public has
already itself made the modem age's myth impossible? The public's
freedom of choice is an aesthetic fiction, which passes the title of
creativity - which in the meantime is no longer cherished or is modestly
passed over in silence - to the other side. Henri Pousseur had passed
the commission for a Faust opera for Brussels on to Michel Butor, as
the librettist he wanted. One can imagine that the answer was uttered
there that is in fact ascribed to the composer's friend in the text "A
Faust? ... My God! ... But then, why not?"13 And when the composer
checks again with the theater director as to whether it actually has to
be a Faust, he receives the answer that it must be: "After all, we must
take the public's tastes and desires into consideration."
All of that would be unthinkable if the Faust theme had not en-
trenched itself deeply in the consciousness of the epoch. It is not only
that every allusion to the material is bound to be recognized with an
"Aha!" and applauded, but also because one can always anticipate
that every reshaping will make clearer, as in an experiment, the op-
erative forces that emerge from the present situation. What it means
to measure oneself against this material is preestablished by the su-
perabundance of its reception since the old Faust book and Marlowe's
Dr. Faustus. We would know almost nothing of the significance of the
figure if this work on it had not 'disclosed' it-or 'invented' it and
superadded it. The weight and burden of the reception is made manifest
here by the fact that the commission can neither be fulfilled nor
refused. In one of the closings it is Gretchen/Maggy who will agree
to the plan for an opera on the sole condition that "It cannot be a
Faust." When Faust/Henri resists, she tells him straight out that she
doesn't love him anymore. In the finale, which the audience cannot
vote out, the friend, Richard, answers the theater director's question,
which is now directed at him, as to whether he will compose an opera
for him, with the final word: "No." On that, the curtain falls.
It is the fulfillment of Madame de Stael's commandment that nothing
like Faust might be written again- and she would vouch for the French.
Nevertheless, the most important "Faust" since Goethe had already
been written, in France, before Butor announced, with the final no,
the impossibility of fulfilling the commission.
It is an incomparable gesture when Paul Valery tells us that on a
certain day in 1940 he found he was speaking with two voices-that
of Faust and that of Mephistopheles - and all that he did was to \vrite
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Part II
down what he said. One perceives, in this overture "to the wary but
not unwilling reader," that here it is not something ultimate that is
set against what was almost ultimate, but rather an end is sought that
will measure up to a beginning that lies far back and can never be
surpassed. On the one hand, the addition of the possessive pronoun,
Mon Faust [My Faust], relativizes the claim to finality in favor of a
maximum of subjectivity, which also finds expression in acceptance
of the work's fragmentary state; on the other hand, the exchange of
the roles of tempter and tempted between Mephistopheles and Faust
is the most radical, apparently unsurpassable intervention in the
configuration.
As for the relativization, we know from August Wilhelm Schlegel's
report of an experience that the doctor, Zimmermann, had with Goethe
in 1775 that the poet answered his visitor, who inquired about his
(already notorious) Faust, by emptying a bag full of scraps of paper
on the table before him and pointing to it with the words, "Voila mon
Faust!" [There is my Faust!1. 14 People have not given much thought
to the question of what this sack with small pieces of paper, and
Goethe's utterance on the subject, could have meant. Surely it is not
supposed to mean that he had written the manuscript of his Urfaust
[the earliest version of Goethe's Faust] on little pieces of paper and
stored these in a sack. It is much more likely that he led Johann Georg
Zimmermann astray with the remains of the tom pages of a manuscript.
In Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe described the terms of responding
'in kind' on which his relationship with Zimmermann was founded.
The possessive pronoun, the indefinite article, even the plural applied
to Faust's name, are the linguistic indexes of relativization and sub-
jectivization. A plan of Lessing's for a Faust-a plan that remained
fragmentary - is mentioned as early as 1755 in a letter to him from
Moses Mendelssohn. In his Hamburg period he then speaks of "my
second Faust." Our most important source of knowledge of this lost
Faust, the account of Captain von Blankenburg, uses the plural when
it ascribes the revision of the first plan to a time "when 'Fausts' were
being announced from every comer of Germany." Lessing, the reporter
was told "for certain," had "only waited for the appearance of the
other 'Fausts' " to publish his own. The manuscript had then gone
astra y in a shipment from Dresden to W olfenbiittel.
The "waiting" for the other Fausts may contain a hyperbole, since
in 1775 it came to a publicly documented conflict with Goethe's Faust
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Chapter 4
plan. While Schubart's Deutsche Chronik auf dasJahr 1775 [Chronicle of

the year 1775 in Germany] reports that Lessing had "sold his admirable
tragedy Dr. Faust to the managers of the theater" in Vienna, it contains
in a footnote the quotation from Reichard's Theater-Kalender auf das
Jahr 1775 [Theater calendar of the year 1775]: "Goethe too is working
on a Dr. Faust."15 So Lessing delayed with his eye on Goethe. This is
confirmed by a remark of the Berlin Enlightener, Johann Jacob Engel,
to Dobbelin, that Lessing would certainly publish his Doktor Faust as
soon as Goethe had come out with his. Lessing is said to have added
to this declaration: "My Faust-is fetched by the devil, but I want to
fetch G ... 's from him!"16 The loss of the chest containing the manu-
script, which Engel asserts will "be Lessing's masterpiece," has protected
posterity from having to decide who won the competition.
Lessing's plural is an expression of satiety, almost with the impli-
cation: too many Fausts. Therefore it is a Romantic revaluation of the
plural when Achim von Arnim, in his foreword to the [German] trans-
lation of Marlowe' s Faustus in 1 818, makes the statement - suggesting
the inexhaustibility of the topic - that there have not been "enough
Fausts written yet." According to the evidence of his diary for June
11, 1818, Goethe read this translation and thus also Amim's challenging
remark. Can this have contributed to his putting the stamp of definitive
completion on his Faust? Only in 1825 does he again resume work
on it, work that in the diary for February 11, 1826, is described as
"continuation of the main business," and that does not leave him free
until 1831.
Not without a role in relation to this final application of himself to
the Faust theme will have been the fact that in 1824 another man
had coupled the possessive pronoun with the name of Faust, to Goethe's
face. For October 2, 1824, there is only a laconic note: "Heine, from
Gottingen." The visitor had announced himself with the request that
he "be granted the happiness to stand before you for a few minutes."
On the Brocken, he said the desire had overcome him "to make a
pilgrimage to Weimar to show his admiration of Goethe," and ac-
cordingly he had con1e on foot. 17 The demythologized version of the
decision on the Brocken and the pilgrimage reads differently: "In the
autumn I made a walking trip to the Harz Mountains, which I roamed
in all directions, and visited the Brocken, as well as Goethe on my
return journey by way of Weimar. "18 He had been terrified "to the
depth of my soul" by the toothless Olympian in his human decrepitude;
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Part II
only "his eye was clear and sparkling." He had felt the contrast of
their natures, felt scorn for one who did not attach little value to his
life and did not desire to sacrifice it defiantly for an idea. And he felt
himself since that time as being "truly at war with Goethe and his
..
wntIngs. "
Of his having addressed a declaration of war to the poet of Faust,
Heine himself tells us nothing. But could Maximilian Heine really have
been so imaginative in his memoirs, even though they first appeared
in 1866 in the suspect Gartenlaube [The Arbor, a popular magazine], as
simply to invent his brother's laconic exchange of words with Goethe?
Goethe, he says, after inconsequential and condescending overtures,
had suddenly asked Heine, "With what do you occupy yourself cur-
rently?" And the young poet had quickly answered, "With a Faust."
At that Goethe had been taken aback and had only asked, in a sarcastic
tone, whether he had no other business in Weimar. 19 If that were
invented, it would have to have been invented by Heinrich Heine
himself.
There was more involved in the background of what Heine said to
Goethe than the latter may have heard in it: the popularization of the
material that the Olympian had placed under embargo. This hidden
imputation goes further than Butor and Pousseur' s leaving the se-
quences up to the public. The authenticity of what Heine is supposed
to have said to Goethe is reinforced by what he says to Eduard
Wedekind in a conversation in the same year. The conversation had
come around to Goethe's Faust: "I also plan to write one, not in order
to get into a rivalry with Goethe, no, no, everyone should write' a
Faust. "20 Heine already thought of a rigorous reversal of the config-
uration, for his Faust was "to be the exact opposite of Goethe's." The
latter, he says, is always active, giving orders to Mephistopheles; he
wants to make Mephistopheles the active principle, who should "lead
Faust into all sorts of devilry." Then, of course, he could no longer
be a negative principle.
What Heine considers the exact opposite of Goethe's Faust enables
us to measure what a distance still exists between this challenge to
Goethe and the point where Valery takes a hand in 1940. It points
in every respect to a world in which the knower has become superior
to the evil one in what he can do, and the demonic principle can
remember his past glory with an indulgent sn1ile. From Valery's per-
spective there is no longer any vacillation about the fact that the Faust
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Chapter 4
material is now represented exclusively by Goethe's work. Every au-

dacity of the reception must relate to the independent form that that
work gave to its figures for the entire century that followed it. At the
same time, it is evident that Valery was not an intensive reader of
Goethe; it is doubtful whether he ever read Faust II. He is not familiar
with Goethe philology, and so the strange story of a remark of Wieland's
about the change in Goethe's intentions regarding the end of Faust,
a story reported by Bernhard Rudolf Abeken, will never have reached
him. Only once, Wieland said, in the earliest days in Weimar, did
Goethe break his silence on this subject in an animated social gathering,
when he said: "You think the devil will fetch Faust. Just the reverse:
Faust fetches the devil. "21 Now this is not Valery's problem, for he
shifts the exchange of roles further forward, into the relationship of
tempter and tempted, itself; he rediscovers the Epicurean in Faust,
who knows how to find the immediacy of enjoyment, which alone
can still be tempting.
Valery's Faust problem is no longer who fetches whom, but of what
could that highest moment consist, which was the subject of the old
bet. The scene in the garden, which combines the biblical Paradise
and the kepos [garden] of Epicurus, answers this question at the same
time that it dismisses any idea that duration could be secured for the
pure immediacy of experience. One must compare this to the end of
Goethe's Faust, in which the large-scale blessing of mankind-though
only for the blinded Faust, prey to illusions - still does not of itself
repel the wish that it should tarry.e Valery's inversion of the relationship
between Faust and Mephistopheles is not indecision regarding the
outcome, and is also not the isolated notion of overturning the tra-
ditional relationship, but is instead the consequence of the different
answer that he gives to the question of the highest moment.
Therefore, this Faust is not one who is fetched - neither by the
powers above nor by those below - but rather one who is resigned.
A Faust who in the end gives up-seen from a point of view that is
overburdened with the figure of the doer, that is an enonllOUS
deforrnation.
What it means to rnake an end of myth can only be discussed by
weighing the po,,,,ers that are requisite for the purpose. When Goethe
does not allo,v his great, though not guiltless, hero to go to hell, in
spite of the bet that \vas well and truly won by Mephistopheles, this
strikes us Inerely as the avoidance of a barbarislll. The fact that it
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Part II
takes some doing to accomplish it is rela~ed to a sin of Faust's that

did not derive from the passion of curiosity alone. The break with the
tradition of his damnation becomes clearer when he is still entirely
the one possessed by the drive for knowledge, who transgresses the
limits of God's mysteries that are set for man. Evidently Lessing had
wanted to develop Faust entirely out of the tragic quality of this
passion, and had concentrated the devil's temptations in the provision
of unusual means by which to bring about success in knowledge. Then
his intervention in the tradition of the material-not making the ex-
ponent of this passion of the modem age suffer damnation-seems
all the more serious. He must only renounce precipitancy in the pursuit
of the progress of knowledge. In Lessing's case, the situation is not
so much that immoderation of the striving for truth- as the demand
for instantaneous and complete knowledge - should not be culpable,
as rather that what this human excess suffers should in any case not
be hell. Lessing's conception is more closely connected than is Goethe's
to the modem age's consciousness of itself as an epoch of the exclu-
siveness of the knowledge drive. From this perspective, Valery's lib-
eration of the Faust figure from all theoretical curiosity is brought into
still clearer relie£
When seven spirits of hell present themselves to Lessing's Faust,
he asks them which of them is the swiftest; only the seventh satisfies
him, because it claims to be as swift as the passage from good to evil.
He abuses the others as "Orcus's snails." This Faust of Lessing's is
himself an anti-Lessing insofar as before the alternatives of possessing
the whole truth or continuing endlessly in the striving for truth he,
unlike his master, would desire the whole truth, and immediately. He
is a despiser of the principle of gradualness. But it is this principle
that stamps the program of the Education of the Human Race. Lessing's
Faust is an enthusiast, because enthusiasts often have a clairvoyant
vision of the future, but "for this future he cannot wait." He wants
it to come quickly, and wants himself to be the one who is able to
make it come quickly.
"A thing over which nature takes thousands of years is to come to
maturity just at the moment of his experience. "22 An index of this
impatience is that among enthusiasts the idea of the transmigration
of souls, of the repetition of life, possesses no attractiveness. The
enthusiast is a type who at bottom always flirts with the intervention
of omnipotence, which could grant right now what, despite the absence
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Chapter 4
of difficulty and resistance, it delays and makes dependent on cir-

cumstances. It is a principle opposed to his Faust when Lessing says,
"It is not true that the shortest line is always straight." The myth of
the transmigration of souls is Lessing's answer to the objection that
the progress of knowledge in mankind as a whole condemns the
individual to the accidental benefit of what happens to have been
achieved, and to the accidental lack of what has not yet been achieved.
It enables us to surmise why, for Schopenhauer, transmigration will
be the most perfect and to that extent the final myth. Lessing, too,
treats it as the oldest hypothesis: "But why should not every individual
man have been present more than once in this world?" His Faust, on
the other hand, is the one who would answer in the affirmative the
question that Lessing designed for a negative answer: "Do I bring
away so much from one visit that it is perhaps not worth the trouble
of coming again?" All of this presses toward the sentence with which
the Education of the Human Race, not accidentally, closes-because it
combines the dogma of immortality with the myth of return and thus
postulates the indifference of time for a subject who would otherwise
have to take insuperable offense at the mere contingency of his position
in the history of the human race: "And what then have I to lose? Is
not the whole of eternity mine?"
What Lessing had described, in the notes for the prologue of his
Faust, as an error and as the origin of vice-namely, to have "too
great an appetite for knowledge" -appears from the perspective of
the Education of the Human Race as the expression of a consciousness
of time that is hard pressed, that is bound fast to finitude, and that
lacks the generous scale of both dogma and myth. Faust is the figure
of a world of interminable pressing forward, in which one can never
have enough time and can never use it quickly enough. One needs
more than one life. Valery's contradiction can be related to this central
point of the Faust tradition: His Faust's highest moment is one of the
complete indifference of time, of unsurpassable presentness, but also
consequently of unrepeatability. This is the formal element, in Mon
Faust, by which [the] myth is brought to an end.
Valery's Faust is no longer a figure of the hypertrophic appetite for
knowledge. To contrast him with this tradition means also to picture
him again as the Epicurean, who holds out to Mephistopheles, who
is engrossed in the temptations of the modem age, the old tactile
enjoyment, sensual experience. The appetite for knowledge no longer
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needed defense; what did, no doubt, wa~ what one would ever be
able to make of its successes, to do with the time that was gained or
was still to be gained as a scope perhaps for unexpected things-say,
for the enjoyment of one's self and of the world (an enjoyment that
is always old, not to be pushed forward by any progress) in the garden
scene with the demoiselle de cristal [crystal girl] to whom Valery gave
the quite simple and unambiguous name "Lust" [German "pleasure"].
His Faust is not in need of redemption [Erlosung]; he is entirely satisfied
with the solution [Losung] of absorption in the moment. So Lust too is
not the earthly or the heavenly Gretchen; she does not entangle him
and does not redeem him; she is a tactile element in the impressionism
of the garden scene.
Let us not forget that the garden was the location of Epicurus' s
school; here Faust learns everything that is still worth his learning-
above all, the standstill of time, the relaxation of this pressure, from
which Lessing had wanted to free his Faust in another, now no longer
feasible, manner. Jauss has shown that Faust's discovery of sensualism
in the garden scene is stylized after Descartes's dream. 23 This also is
no accident, if one bears in mind Valery's lifelong argument with
Cartesianism, especially in the Cahiers. I also think of the experience
of 'conversion' to positivism that is related by Ernst Mach in the Analysis
of Sensations of 1886: "On a bright summer day out in the open air
the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent
mass of sensations, only more strongly coherent in the ego. Although
the actual working out of this thought did not occur until a later period,
yet this moment was decisive for my whole view. "f Is it so difficult
to imagine that Valery saw no other possibility of bringing to an end
the myth of the figure of the craving for knowledge, the myth that
fascinates the modem age, other than by letting his Faust be dissolved
in an entirely undoctrinaire sensualism, whose evidence is tactile?
Then this Faust would not only be a counterfigure to Goethe's. As
such it would probably have to have been set up differently, and in
a clearer relationship, quite apart from the question of how well and
completely Valery actually knew Goethe's Faust. But his Faust is more
than an anti-Faust-he is an un-Faust: the possibility of a Faust brought
to an end, as the beginning of his impossibility. To the bewilderment
of Mephistopheles, the garden scene is still pure myth, repetition of
the Paradise scene, recognizable by the handing over of the fruit of
which Lust has taken a bite. We do not need the variation that the
apple here is a peach (cf. piche),g particularly since in the biblical text
the fruit is not specified at all. Mephistopheles is not promoted to
"undevil"; he exhausts his entire obsolete noncomprehension in order
to arrive at the statement: "C'est une reprise" [It's the same thing all
over again]. Faust is correct when he says that with Mephistopheles
the fate of evil itself is at stake, and that could also be the end of the
soul.
Faust wants to and can be happy again, in spite of the fateful lapse
of the ancient promise that it would be theory on which man's happiness
would be founded. This Faust begins with memory; he dictates his
memoirs to Lust-not the memoirs of an individual but those of the
epich whose prototype he is. He has become historical to himself, and
only the garden scene enables him to escape from understanding
himself as historical. He announces to the "disciple" that he is tired
of everything that prevents him from existing. When Faust in the
garden, in the midst of dictating his memoirs, finally speaks of the
magnificence of the evening, and Lust mechanically repeats this from
her transcript, Faust interrupts her: "Mais non ... Je ne dicte
pas ... J'existe" [No, no ... I'm not dictating ... I exist]. It is the end
of the Cartesian consciousness in these moments: an "I" that thinks
nothing. The universe that had meant so much to Faust has become
a matter of indifference to him as what fills this consciousness; therefore
it thinks nothing. This nothing, of world, is at the same time the
everything of the presence of the self for itself, which Faust must
formulate almost in the formula of the biblical God: 'J e suis celui que
je suis." [I am he who I am]. His work of art now is only to live, and
his greatest work: to feel, to breathe. It is the moment that would
have made the classical Faust lose the wager, this itat supreme [supreme
state], in which all questions and all answers are disposed of with a
smile.
If I described the garden scene as positivistic in the sense of Mach's
early experience, as sensualistic, since in it everything becomes a cloud
of sensations, then this is only half of the case. It is also mystical. For
in contrast to all theory, which is based on 'intuition' [Anschauung,
literally, "viewing"] and its original identity with optical perception,
and understands everything else with metaphors from this field (right
down to the 'nonintuitive' [Unanschaulichkeit, the "abstract" or "formal"D,
mysticism is, in its tendency or indeed in its fulfillment, tactile. It
wants to touch, and in exchange for that it accepts obscurity \vhere
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intuition is denied to it. Why? Because it. believes that in touching it

achieves an immediate relationship to reality, to a reality, even an
unknown one.
This interweaving of touching with consciousness of reality is every-
where in Valery's garden scene. The self-predications of existence,
life, breathing, and looking, which are constructed according to the
Cartesian model of the cogito, find their unexpected intensification in
what could be the still more present element in the present situation
(and, for the old Cartesian, that always means also the more compelling
evidence): ')E TOUCHE ... " [I touch ... ]. In touching, the distinction
between activity and passivity, in which the "I" is strictly delimited
vis-a.-vis what is no longer it or not yet it, disappears. The unsurpassable
reality is when the occurrence of touching arises indistinguishably both
from touching and from being touched: "Quoi de plus reel? J e touche?
Je suis touche" [What could be more real? I touch? I am touched].
The great problem of Cartesianism, the problem that Valery had
penetrated so deeply and had circled around so untiringly-solipsism-
is not refuted, not made obsolete; it has only lost its subject, just as
it has lost the "other" as a problem of certainty. For Faust, despite
the fact that he still believes himself to be experiencing his presence
to himself 'ecstatically, 'h Lust is more certain than he is himself. It is
the moi pur [pure self] of the Cartesian tradition that has evaporated
in this convergence of sensualism and mysticism.
We do not know what consequences the garden scene was supposed
to have for Faust and Lust, how they could finally separate from one
another. From the highest state, they fall back into the relationship
of dictation. That they did separate we know from the "Solitaire"
section ["The Hermit"-literally, "The Only One"] and from the "Feerie
dramatique" ["Dramatic Fairy Story"] that brings everything to a finish.
For here Faust becomes the witness of the curses of the universe ["Les
Maledictions de l'Univers" is the subtitle of this section]: on the summit
of the iciest solitude, the negation of the supposed success in the garden
scene. Is this its refutation? Very probably. Unless the desperate con-
jecture should be correct, that Valery originally intended to put the
"Solitaire" before "Lust."
It is true that the hermit is a Nietzschean figure, even linguistically
a result of reading Nietsche; but he is not simply an expression of the
deadly boredom of the eternal return, of the solitude of the superman
as one who has been led astray, not by the principle of evil, but by
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his own potential. The nihilistic dimension does not suit Mephistopheles;
he quickly goes back down from the height, calling to Faust that they
will meet again, he will wait for him further down. That is what finally
miscarries so badly for him that it confutes him. It is true that Faust
has not so much overcome the prejudices of his history as he has
dissolved them, but Mephistopheles retains them entirely; he remains
the residue of medievalness that was necessary to the modem age so
that that age could establish its distance from it-not from evil, but
rather from the difference between good and evil. That man always
remains the same is the epitome of Mephistopheles's prejudices, and
that he himself does the same - that, he is forced to hear Faust tell
him, is his historical error.
What Faust experiences on the summit of the mountain is, according
to his own words, the enormous extent of nothingness in everything.
But the vertigo in the face of abysses, by which Pascal had still been
overcome, is now unknown to Faust: 'Je puis regarder Ie fond d'un
ab'ime avec curiosite. Mais, en general, avec indifference" [I can look
into the pit of an abyss with curiosity. But, in general, with indifference]'
The abyss and the hermit- they are the metaphors of nihilism, the
images of the modem age's failure in the face of a question that it
posed for the first time in this nakedness and for which it had forbidden
itself every dogmatic and every mythical answer: the question of the
reason for being. The subject is announced in the hermit's displeasure
with Faust, which he expresses with the laconic four letters: "Tu es"-
you are.
It is almost a matter of course that a last Faust-whose finality is
supposed to be the self-discovery of his own impossibility-meets with
the questionableness of his right to existence and to its conditions in
the world. The "Solitaire" section answers the question what is left
for Faust-what is left for the Faust if a Faust has become impossible.
The answer takes the form of the alternatives: either to deride the
conditions under which it has become impossible to be a Faust, in the
curses of the cosmos, or to accept with resignation one's own im-
possibility, in the lap of the fairies.
Valery would then have remained entirely on the lifeline that began
with his Leonardo essays: He would have follo\ved the exploration of
the possibility of a Leonardo with that of the impossibility of a Faust.
For that, however, the garden scene must precede the encounter with
the hermit. Only the first presents the ~oundless as the really real.
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As such it is, of course, unreliable, I!l0mentary, fleeting, and

unrepeatable - something, in other words, on which a Faustian exis-
tence can no longer and cannot again be grounded. Part of Faust's
impossibility is the exhibition of his relationship to the question of the
reason for being, in the momentary groundlessness of the garden
scene. It is only from this that there follows that which puts an end
to him-the experience that precedes resignation. After the absolute
one-time-only quality of the experience in the garden, the monotony
of eternal recurrence that is embodied in the hermit has become
unbearable. But when the hermit plunges him into the abyss, Faust
also refuses the mercy of young existence that he is offered by the
fairies. Here already his last word is no-as it is again in Butor.
In every claim to bring a myth to an end the more far-reaching,
if only implied, claim is exposed that one brings myth [as such] to an
end when one displays one final myth. The evidence that it is the last
myth requires a totality, a perfection whose fateful effectiveness consists
precisel y, not in the fulfillment of the intention that commands us to
forgo further production of myths, but rather in its making it possible
for the first time to experience the fascination that does not allow one
to rest until one has imitated the model, equaled the standard that it
sets, or even surpassed it. Under the conditions of the modem age,
which cannot invent gods-scarcely even allegories-any longer, that
means to put new, from abstract to highly abstract titles in the place
of the old names: the "I," the world, history, the unconscious, Being.
The type of effort that is involved in satisfying the paradigm established
by Idealism's fundamental myth is exemplified again in Schopenhauer's
transmigration of souls, in Nietzsche's eternal recurrence of the same,
in Scheler's comprehensive schema of the God who is in the process
of becoming, with his division into impulse [Drang] and essence, and
in Heidegger's story of Being, with its anonymous speaker.
Such total schemata are mythical precisely in the fact that they
drive out the desire to ask for more and to invent more to add. While
they do not provide answers to questions, they make it seem as though
there is nothing left to ask about. The standard [Normierung] that a
'final myth' has to satisfy was, if I see it correctly, first laid down by
Schopenhauer. For him the myth of the transmigration of souls is the
epitome of a story that comes as close to philosophical truth as any
story that could be devised. It is to be considered, he says, as the
"non plus ultra" [that than which nothing is higher] of myth, its richest
and most important instance. 24 Wherein does this quality of the myth
of reincarnations consist? In contrast to Nietzsche's idea of recurrence,
it does not make the world return to what it once was, repeating its
passages eternally, without change. Instead, the subject returns to its
world, not as something that is eternally the same, but rather, according
to the measure of what it can expect, it returns into the form of
existence of which it is able to make itself worthy. It is not the ex-
pectation of iron repetition of the course of the world, once that course
has been produced by action, that extracts the highest forrn of re-
sponsibility from the subject. Its attitude to the world, its epoche [re-
straint], approaching that of the ancient world's 'wise man' once more,
relieves it of precisely that overload of reality, to the extent that it
withdraws itself from it.
In 1830, Ludwig Feuerbach resolutely opposed any thought of the
transmigration of souls with the argument that it drew "the great and
serious tragedy of nature into the vulgar sphere of bourgeois, economic
Philistinism," and Inade "the deep abysses of nature into shallow
country streams" in which individuals look at their reflections and
along which they pick pretty flowers. Feuerbach had in mind partic-
ularly the 'cosmic' transmigration of souls, from star to star, and
reproached it with totally overlooking "nature's terribly serious, dark
and dismal aspects. "25 But what is instructive in the manner of this
objection is the irresistible urgency of opposing to the great final myth
the outline of a myth, once again a final one, of one's own. Since
there is only room for one final myth, the rivalry between candidates
for that position takes on characteristics of dogmatism. What shakes
the one that occupies the position already is not so much the reproach
that it is false as rather the objection that it is unbearable: that God
created the world for the migrating souls in the manner of a treasury
official or an economist. The young Feuerbach sees before him an
entirely different type of mythical god, that of the contemporary poet
in his state of creative absentmindedness: "God forgot himself when
he created the world; no doubt he produced nature intentionally and
consciously, but not as a result of intention and consciousness, but.
rather as a result of his nature, behind the back of his consciousness,
as it were. It was not as a shrewdly calculating head of a family or
construction foreman, but as a self-forgetful poet that he fi~alned the
great tragedy of nature." This is not yet the God who experiments
with man's freedom, the God for whom the \\Torld is a risky adventure.
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For that, man not only had to understand himself as an experimenting

being, who can fail himself [the experimenter], just as he was able to
create himself; history also had to contain a greater risk than that of
man's success or failure: that of his possible self-destruction.
Only from this new self-experience does something like a new form
of Scholasticism's cosmological argument arise: If the world is such
that it contains an absolute risk, the God of this world can only be a
God of absolute risk. "God's own destiny, his doing or undoing, is at
stake in this universe to whose unknowing dealings he committed his
substance, and man has become the eminent repository of this supreme
and ever betrayable trust. In a sense, he holds the fate of deity in his
hands." Hans Jonas entitled this myth of his a "hypothetical" one. 26
It has the form of an odyssey, for its hero, so that a world might
exist, betook himself to a foreign place, "divested himself of his deity-
to receive it back from the odyssey of time weighted with the chance
harvest of unforeseeable temporal experience: transfigured or even
possibly disfigured by it." Organic life is the summation and the cul-
minating point of this odyssey, an "essentially precarious and cor-
ruptible being, an adventure in mortality." What does this God seek
in his wanderings? He seeks to "try out his hidden essence and discover
himself through the surprises of the world-adventure."
Feuerbach' s wish not to see a Philistine behind the world is certainly
more than fulfilled by this God of the great adventure. But is the
other intention that Jonas has with his myth also fulfilled: not only to
present, impressively, the risky character of the world, but also to
make plausible to man his responsibility for more than himself-for
the absolute? "We literally hold in our faltering hands the future of
the divine adventure and must not fail Him, even if we would fail
ourselves." As in Nietzsche's idea of recurrence, the issue here is the
production of a most extreme seriousness, which has expanded, in
scarcely a century, to include responsibility for means of wruch Nietzsche
could not have dreamed, even for a superman.
The weakness of this-yet again-final myth, which though hy-
pothetical is after all meant to contain a little truth, is contained in
the laconic question why man is allowed so little carelessness when
his God is metaphysical carelessness in such prototypical excess that
he ventured to create a world that is so capable of miscarriage. Is an
ethic of faithful stewardship of the world really the only logically
consistent attitude to the presuppositions of this myth? Would not
man have to give back to his author, calmly and perhaps even with
malicious pleasure, the responsibility for having chosen to experiment
with him?
In the end an equally hypothetical but no less true variant of the
myth could not be excluded, in which man prevents the homecoming
of this metaphysical Odysseus, so that he cannot set out on new
adventures. In correspondence with Jonas, Rudolf Bultmann 'demy-
thologized' Jonas's myth by describing man's responsibility as the
responsibility for someone else's "work of art," and saying of the
absolute subject of the world adventure that this concept of God is
"ultimately an aesthetic concept."27 It is fascinating to see how the
master of the "demythologizing" of the New Testament confronts the
man who disclosed the fundamental myth of Gnosticism and wants
to deny him the renewal of the form of the mythical, as a category
that is now only aesthetically satisfying. Jonas defends God's risky
venture, and does not deny that what is at issue is "the joy of the
divinity" as approbation of the world's success and that this would at
the same time be "relief," because "the danger of miscarriage and
betrayal was great."
Jonas responds to Bultmann's objection by saying that in this hy-
pothetical myth the aesthetic itself becomes the content of the ethical:
"We who want to exist and therefore accept the sacrifice of incarnation,
must justify this incarnation.... Reflection of and response to existence
in art, knowledge of existence in science, are thus man's ethical duty.
By fulfilling himself in this manner he fulfills a need of existence as
a whole. Objective knowledge can still be called aesthetic, but its
acquisition is ethical." It is, as Jonas finally admits to the Christian
theologian, a myth of incarnation, but without the presuppositions of
the dogma of the Trinity-in other words it is a myth that, since it
still keeps open the question of the failure or success of the world,
probably does not want to gamble away the proviso of messianism
either.
Looking back from here at Schopenhauer's "non plus ultra" of a
myth, one can grasp more precisely what its distinction consists in. It
is the exclusiveness of the subject's responsibility to himself and for
himself Schopenhauer gave myth its highest value by trying to preserve
in it, if not to intensify, Kant's concept of the postulate: i Immortality,
he said, should not be an object of knowledge and should not be a
dogma, and if it were it would be a false one because it would involve
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a confusion of the appearance and the ~hing in itself. The story of

souls remains a myth, for practical use. It is preferable to the myth
of the posthumous judgment of an individual, unrepeatable life, "partly
because it fits the truth more closely, partly because it is less tran-
scendent.... "28 If it were possible to anticipate with certainty that a
judgment will be held over the quality of an individual life and what
happened to occasion it, this would necessarily destroy the morality
of the actions in it. Calculation of results in terms of reward and
punishment would be compelling, and thus the motive of respect for
the moral law would be nullified. If one expects another life that is
dependent on the quality of the present one, one need not see the
improved conditions of one's return as the reward of moral conduct-
one can desire them as the aggregate of the preconditions under which
it would be easier to satisfy the demands of the [moral] law. Thus
only when it is expanded does the postulate of immortality become
the myth that excludes calculation.
Kant himself had given serious consideration to the idea of the
cosmic transmigration of souls, when he was able to pronounce only
an infinite progress, on the part of the moral subject, as adequate to
the absolute demand posed by the moral law. But how was such a
progress conceivable? Surely only if the moral quality of each finite
course of life permitted one to expect more favorable conditions for
moral action in the altered world of the next life. In other words, a
reduction of the danger of moral resignation in view of the divergence
between worthiness of happiness and the reality of happiness - however
little the moral subject may make the convergence of the two a condition
of its submission to the moral law.
If one imagines such altered life-worlds as altered in regard to the
socialization of moral subjects, who have less need to fear that others
will be intent on the advantages of immoral action, then it is natural
to picture them not as the relevant future, in each case, of human
history but rather as involving transition to other cosmic bodies. While
a philosophy of history could postulate that the appropriately qualified
subject returns in a period of more highly developed legality, so as
to obtain the greater ease of morality in it, the myth of the cosmic
transmigration of souls can postulate the leap in space - into other
worlds, that is - and assume the existence there of beings of a higher
rationality as partners in moral intersubjectivity.
Admittedly, the result of the cosmic transmigration of souls con-
tradicts Schopenhauer's retraction of individuation; in contrast to the
latter, it justifies the world by taking the edge off the contingency of
the spatial and temporal conditions of this existence - in other words,
it reconciles individuation and dependence on the world. To that extent,
given Schopenhauer's n10del of the highest form of myth, a positive
answer to the question of the reason for existence, an 'ontodicy' [jus-
tification of existence], is also possible.
One has first to exhibit this 'ontocidy' as a logical outcome of the
idea of rebirth and the transmigration of souls, in order to contrast
to it Schopenhauer's refusal to accept this logic. If, for him, existence
is only the manifestation of will, and the latter is the basic cause of
suffering, the augmentation of the moral subject can only augment,
along with it, the harm done by individuation. Consequently, in his
version of the myth the transmigration of souls is only the recompense
for suffering that one has inflicted: the reincarnation of the one who
caused suffering on the side of those who have to suffer. A mythical
ius talionis [law of punishment in kind] requires that "all sufferings
which in life one inflicts on other beings must be expiated in a sub-
sequent life in this world, through precisely the same sufferings .... "29
This equivalence evades every positive claim, because "the highest
reward [is one that] the myth can only express negatively in the language
of this world by the promise, which is so often repeated, that [those
who deserve it] shall never be born again." So all transposition of
merit takes place on the negative side only, while on the positive side
the lines disappear, the convergence between deserving happiness and
enjoying it is denied.
This asymmetry is the exact reverse of that in the case of Kant,
where the postulate of immortality is admitted and fortified in the
claim of one who deserves happiness to become happy, but all that
is left for one who does not deserve it is that he can have no interest
whatever in immortality.
Anyone who considers these forms of a 'final myth' to be obsolete
rubbish will be mistaken; the oppressiveness of contingency, which
lies behind the myth, does not cease. Ernst Bloch returns, in 1977, to
a discussion of death and immortality conducted in Konigstein on the
day of Adorno's death in 1969, and desires, on the day of the murder
of Jiirgen Ponto,j that it be published in the final volume of his Ces-
ammelte Schriften [Collected writings]. The interval that is encompassed
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by these dates is perhaps itself an aspect of ~he subject. 30 A 'philosophical

eschatology' must also consider when its questions can be posed and
when it is inexcusable to refuse to listen to them. It will no longer be
able to produce proofs that this or that conception of the end of all
things and of man's 'last things' is the correct one. But it will want
to analyze the stock of such conceptions and discuss what they have
meant and can still mean to the extent that they find people who are
convinced by them, or even merely find agnostics who want to know
the meaning of something that they do not believe they can know.
What, seriously, is the meaning of the transmigration of souls, if it
was both the final and the most highly selected myth? If it was meant
to be a representation of the highest form of conceivable justice, its
problem lies in the fact that everyone now alive would already suffer
the consequences of such justice in his present existence. But evidently
no one is aware of this fact. Hence the transmigration of souls appears
to us as an identity without any consequences. It remains without the
consciousness of ever being the same one again, and consequently
without the serious expectation of having to experience, oneself, the
pain that others suffer as a result of one's actions. If I cannot know
who I was before I was what I am, or who I will be after I have been
this, both things seem not to concern me. Even as the one who is
struck, no one feels the justice that lies in the fact that he was once
the one who did the striking, or even merely that he could have been. 31
That too is myth as distance from fear and hope: an immortality
that one would not need to fear. But also an immortality the absence
of which one cannot look forward to, since the retraction of indivi-
duation does not mean that one who existed at one time, if he reaches
his goal, will still be affected by having reached it. He deserves not
to exist any longer-but consequently, by the same token, he does
not deserve ever to have existed.
Translator's Notes
a. The term Idealism should be understood to refer to German Idealism, as the tenus Idealismus
and idealistisch generally do in German.
b. " ... macht aus der Geschichte wieder eine Geschichte .... " The words for story and history
are identical in German (as they are in the Romance languages: histoire), distinguished only by
the articles employed.
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c. Apollo's name has been traced to the Greek verb apollumi, to destroy.
d. On historical "assertion requirements" see the author's discussion of the changing system
of questions in our tradition, in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1983), pt. 1, chap. 6.
e. Verweilen, to tarry, is what Faust wagered his soul that he would never ask a moment to
do. At the end of Faust II, blinded and tricked into thinking that he is guiding the construction
of a new life for humanity, he does ask it.
£ Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations and the Relation of the Physical to the Psychical, trans. C. M.
Williams (Chicago and London: Open Court, 1914), p. 30, n. 1.
g. Peche "peach," in French, is very similar to peche, sin.
h. In ekstatisch, here, we need to be aware of the Greek root, ekstasis, literally, "standing outside"
(a sense of the term that was revived by Heidegger), as well as our emotionally tinged idea
of ecstasy as exalted delight, trance, and so on.
i. For Kant, God, freedom, and immortality are postulates presupposed by practical reason,
though they are not objects of any possible knowledge. See "On the postulates of pure practical
reason in general," in Critique of Practical Reason, trans. L. W. Beck (New York: Liberal Arts
Press, 1956), pp. 137f[
j. Jiirgen Ponto, a leading West German banker, was murdered in his home by members of
a 'leftist' underground group on July 3 1, 1977.
Part III
The Theft of Fire Ceases to Be
Sacrilege
1
The Reception of the Sources
Produces the Sources of the
Reception
There are supposed to be Malay peoples who are so light, so magical,

almost formless, butterflies - but it is the South Seas, it is a dream, it
is not us. Europe is the continent of abysses and shadows. Just think
how in our brightest land, in Greece, Prometheus was forced onto the
rock, and how he suffered!
-Gottfried Benn to Kathe von Porada
One of man's-even contemporary man's-fundamental experiences

is the transitory quality of flame, of fire, in reality and also as a
metaphor for something that is extinguished as easily as life is extin-
guished. The difficulty, which has become an unusual one, of not
having a "light" [in German, "having no fire"] is now only an echo
of the conscio'usness that fire is something that can be lost. If this is
something that need not give us grounds for concern, that is only
because we have learned, and know, how to make it. Only a retro-
spective consideration of man's early history that penetrates into the
depths of time allows us to guess at the borderline situation in which
the accidental acquisition of fire had passed over into its permanent
possession, perhaps under the pressure of a change in climate. Myth
touches on this threshold - one of the lowerings of the level of the
absolutism of reality - with the idea that fire had to be stolen from
the gods and brought to men.
Something that was always incomprehensible, too, was the self-
sameness of the flame, which moves and can also stand still again,
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as though it does not use itself up and as though it is the form given
to a matter. What actually happens in combustion is, historically, one
of the things man most recently came to understand. Where he needs
and uses fire, where he attributes part of his technical skill and his
capacity for culture to it, there arises, as with other things, the suspicion
that it would eventually after all have to use itself up, become weaker,
degenerate, and require renewal. As late as the Stoics, this idea is the
basis of a systematic account of the 'world fire': Its initial power of
giving form gradually weakens and degenerates into a power of mere
destruction. It puts a final end to each world epoch with a world
combustion. This cycle, too, is seen in the perspective of an organic
background metaphor: Fire has its vegetative periodicity, its world
seasons. How impressive is the idea of fire's self-creation is shown by
the world wide distribution of cults of fire renewal. They still contain
something of the idea that while fire is, indeed, a protected possession
at the center of life and of religious rites, this precious thing must
nevertheless be surrendered, in the interests of its purity, in a great
gesture of humility in the face of its quality as something that cannot
be taken for granted - that its possession must be risked in order to
be maintained.
One would expect old handicrafts that depend on the use and
possession of fire to be closely associated with and to lend expression
to its fostering through ritual. If, following the hypothesis that was at
first restricted to ancient Egypt, one regards the cult as the more
original element in comparison to the myth, and the story as a mere
interlinear version of the stereotype-which has become unintelligi-
ble - of a ritual, then one will recognize Prometheus as the old god
of the renewal of the fire in the workshops of the Attic potters and
smiths. To them, the fire that gives form had to have a higher origin.
That is why the craftsmen in the Kerameikos quarter of Athens received
their annually renewed fire from runners bearing torches from the
distant altar of Prometheus in the grove of Academic Apollo. Such
palpable phenomena are the first stage on the way to a generalization
that extends the idea to the lives of everyone.
The acknowledgment of dependency, in rituals of worship, is a way
of making sure of continuance and nondestruction. Prometheus guar-
antees to men that their culture cannot be interfered with. Only he,
as a Titan, could have stolen fire, not those for whose preservation
he did it. For only he could endure and outlast, and in the end triumph
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over, his punishment for the crime. According to one presentation of

the myth, Prometheus is not fully liberated; he continues to carry with
him, through the world, the chain by which he was fastened by the
leg, and at its end a piece of rock broken from the Caucasus.
The myth does not allow his figure to return to its initial condition.
It is a representation of irreversibility. This only becomes clear when
one sees the theft of fire as the provision of the technique by which
to produce fire, as the psychoanalytic interpretation of myth especially
has to do because otherwise it does not get the archaic fire-making
equipment that it needs: the rotating rubbing stick and the softer
board, with a socket, against which it rubs. When one knows how to
make fire, one has become resistant to divine wrath. That is why Zeus
simply cannot reverse the theft of fire by taking it away from men,
so as to keep it as the exclusive property of heaven, its place of origin.
In the end nothing has changed for the gods, but everything has
changed for men. Having been created by the Titans, they must reckon
with the ill will of Olympian Zeus, but they have someone who has
survived that ill will and prevents it from having consequences, someone
whom they can count on as having tamed Zeus.
This diagram gives the potters' god a disposition to guarantee more
than the possession of energy by his craftsmen, namely, the entire
form of life of men - their having outgrown, through culture, the
naked state of nature-and ultimately their 'theory,' as something
that continues to need flame only in the metaphorical function of
light. The Prometheus myth represents the archaic division of powers
in its pure form. One may not import into this the idea that the myth
gave Prometheus the motive of love for men. They may have first
become his creatures because it had long been established that he
patronized them, and their Titanic origin was thus at least connected
to the one member of the discarded generation of the gods who had
been an ally of Zeus against the dynasty of Cronus. It is entirely in
the manner of myth when we learn nothing about why Prometheus
is prepared to risk Zeus's wrath and persecution in order to show so
much favor to men. What is decisive is not that there was a relation
between the potter and his products but rather the image of the
unrepentant, unweakening one who, while a captive and tortured,
remains the stronger.
It was inevitable that the giver of fire would be related to burnt
offerings in worship. That is why not only was the fire [or the potters
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and smiths delivered by torch-bearing rup-ners at the festivals of Pro-

metheus and Hephaestus, but also at the Great Panathenaea the sac-
rificial fire was brought in a race to the heap of wood burned in honor
of Athena. That will have produced the myth of the relationship
between the two. When Athena aids Prometheus in the theft of fire
by secretly giving him access to the sun, it should not be forgotten
that she is the daughter of the Titaness Metis, whom Zeus had made
pregnant and then swallowed because an oracle of Gaea had warned
him that Metis, though she would bear him a daughter, the next time
would bear him a son who would be destined to dethrone him. In
every contact with the tribe of the Titans there is hidden the germ
of a conspiracy; there is suspicion pointing in the direction of the gods'
fate of being supplanted in power. If Goethe is logical, though ge-
nealogically mistaken, in ascribing to Prometheus a father-son conflict
with Zeus,a what is involved in Athena's assistance in the theft of fire
is more nearl y an old rebellion. Homer still knows something of a
plot between Athena and Hera and Poseidon to shackle the father;
but Thetis foresaw this and scared off the conspirators with the help
of one of the hundred-handed ones [the hekatoncheires-giantsl.
Prometheus's relation to the fire used in sacrifices contains another
point of departure for his friendliness to men. The possibility that he
might come to men's aid in resisting the excessive demands of their
gods and their priests is a natural one for the fire-bringer. That he
should receive organized worship in return for helping men to arrive
at an easier mode of sacrifice, in which they eat the good meat of
the sacrificial animals themselves and leave only the bones and the
fat for the gods, is a justification of which only myth's deft touch
would be capable. It may even be that the more serious conflict over
the theft of fire was at one time derived from this, since the gift of
fire need not originally have involved theft. Zeus's withholding fire
from men - the fire that they owed to the gift of lightning from
heaven-would originally have been a punishment for the stinginess
in sacrifice that showed itself in the sacrificial deception. b Men's un-
authorized enlargement of their share of the product of nature, the
curtailment of a practice of sacrifice that was expanding beyond what
people could keep up, would be the oldest background, and Pro-
metheus's defiance, with the theft of fire, of Zeus's cynical verdict
"Let them eat their flesh raw" would only be secondary. Of course,
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to put that in Zeus's mouth would still have been entirely impossible
for Hesiod; it first appears as a late interpolation by Lucian.
Kurt von Fritz has justly concluded that the sacrificial deception had
originally been successfuL It would have been carried out by the
mortals themselves, not directly by Prometheus but on his advice.
What Hesiod relates about this would then be the reformed version,
which no longer wants to believe the highest god capable of succumbing
to the cunning of the patron of men. This conjecture is probable if
only because it was only success in the sacrificial deception that could
make permanent the unpunished reduction in the share of the product
of agriculture that went to the gods and priests. In fact the circumstance
that in the common form of animal sacrifice the gods did not receive
the better portion is a suitable expression of the stage in the decline
of the will to submission that is represented in myth, and especially
in the individual myth of Prometheus. Nothing had more pressing
need of the sanction of myth than refraining from zeal in sacrifice.
As unclear as the beginning of the story of Prometheus - the Titan's
definite commitment to man's fate-seems, then, in what has been
handed down to us, the versions of its upshot are equally various. On
the one hand there is what persists in narrative in our own time, and
has become emblematic: the chaining of Prometheus to the Caucasus,
or elsewhere, where his liver is eaten by the eagle, and daily restored;
on the other hand there is the liberation of the Titan by the greatest
of Zeus's sons, or else under the pressure of his secret knowledge of
the Olympian's possible fall as a result of his next paternity. The
question of the age of the two denouements has often been posed
and never been satisfactorily answered. We can accept that as meaning
that both of them do justice to the fundamental need, which is addressed
in the myth, to see the permanence of the human possession of culture,
the irreversibility of the development despite Zeus's ill will and revenge,
established. For this purpose it is enough that the Titan who is allied
with men defies Zeus, whether as an unbending and immortal sufferer
or as one who is liberated and returns home to his sanctuary in Athens.
Something that is instructive in regard to the possible priority of
one version is the analogy that can be seen in Prometheus's brothers,
the Titans Atlas and Menoeceus, who are sons of Cronus's brother
Iapetus and are thus members of the same generation as Zeus. Men-
oeceus is struck down by a bolt of Zeus's lightning and Atlas is con-
demned to carry the vault of the heavens. Here there are evidently
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no liberations or pardons. But Prometheu~ does have a special position,

because he had been an ally of Zeus in the struggle with the Titans.
His deliverance from the eagle, by Hercules, is attested on Attic vases
as very old. Here the figure of the deliverer is just as important as
that of the delivered; not only because the former is designated by
myth for such acts of deliverance but even more because as a son of
Zeus he really has greater freedom of action vis-a-vis the father. Goethe
could not have made Prometheus the son of Zeus if the figure of
Hercules had come to his attention in time. The potter modeling man
out of clay in his workshop, whom Goethe had before him, is still too
distant from the other deeds and sufferings to already have the ap-
pearance of passion and of needing liberation that go with a Sturm
und Drang god. Hercules is a decisive participant in the definitive
C
transformation of what one might call the overall mythical situation.

The extirpator of monsters also becomes the softener of his father,
who is warned against new procreations and has to be satisfied with
the last and mightiest of his sons.
The question of what was in Hesiod's original text and what is
interpolation is controversial. He has difficulties with anything that
puts Zeus's position in an ambiguous light. So he does not include
Prometheus's final liberation. In the Theogony the chaining of the Titan
to a column or a post-not yet to a rock, and without any other
indication of location-is in the present tense. Hercules is allowed to
do something to alleviate Prometheus's torment, by killing the eagle
and putting an end to the eating of his liver, but may not put an end
to the chains or the post. It is understandable that Zeus does not
permit the deliverer from monsters to do more than kill the eagle,
because the variant of the story in which Prometheus is unchained is
inescapably bound up with the assumption that Zeus's power had
been at stake and that he had only been able to preserve it at the
cost of releasing Prometheus. This is something that Hesiod cannot
and may not speak of. Since Aeschylus knows the version involving
Prometheus's liberation, it may have been an Attic local myth relating
to an interest in having Prometheus return to his sanctuary, while to
Hesiod his continuing in chains may have been a better guarantee of
the continuance of Zeus's power. This conclusion is analogous to the
handling of the hekatoncheires [the "hundred-handed" giants], who are
freed from their fetters in return for the aid they give to Zeus, but
are nevertheless sent back to their place of exile in the underworld.
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One who is supposed to be the final god can no longer be capable

of being outwitted. That throws our attention back to the initial problem
of the deceptive sacrifice, and determines that Zeus knew about the
trick of extracting the meat from it. He does not prevent it, even
though he sees through it; no doubt so as to put the advocate of the
rights of men in the wrong and to let his rationality appear as short-
sighted stupidity. For it subjects Prometheus to the necessity of fetching
back from heaven the fire that is taken away from men. With that,
the mythical configuration begins to be suited to tragedy.
With his eyes open, Zeus lets Prometheus, in his efforts on behalf
of men, become not only ridiculous but also guilty. Thus he can
assume, in his harsh persecution of Prometheus, the just role of one
who punishes wrongdoing. This basic pattern of tragedy, over which
Plato becomes indignant, is still the pattern followed by Paul, who
was familiar with tragedy. He has his God promulgate a law that man
cannot comply with and that inevitably makes him guilty. The story
that underlies Paul's Letter to the Romans is the story of a tragic hero
whose death - even if it is only the death of one with whom he is
mystically identified-is the only way out of a situation that he got
into precisely as a result of the Pharisaic will not to incur guilt. What
helps him is the replacement of reality by a symbol: baptism into the
death of another person.
Prometheus's sacrificial deception, too, is the production of a sym-
bol-because what he prepared and offered in place of the real sac-
rificial animal is an image, a substitution, a sign. From that time on,
symbolic pieces of the sacrificial animal could be burned on the altars
of the gods - the deception could be made permanent and the god
could be expected to put up with this because the guilt was delegated
to the Titan who was punished. But the higher concept of a mere
token of one's intent is also, at the same time, a dangerous one,
because the god who is content with a symbol, who is no longer
thought of as one who participates realistically by partaking of the
sacrificial offering, must now weigh the giver's disposition, must in
the end even look into his heart. That is what myth had not known
and what, once again, makes religious laws - short of the realism of
atrocious and enormous sacrifices - impossible to perform or comply
with.
When it seems, in Hesiod, as though Prometheus's second transgres-
sion, the theft of fire from heaven, is only the consequence of the
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punishment that had been inflicted on men as a result of his first

transgression, the deprivation of sacrifice, this will be the result of
secondary systematization. It once again lets Zeus appear to be in the
right, especially since the dispute in Mekone about shares of the sacrifice
designates the end of an epoch in which gods and men had dined
together. What seems more original than this construction is that Zeus
saw in men alien creatures of the Titans and did not grant them the
fire that they needed, not indeed for naked survival, but certainly for
an easier existence. In Hesiod's construction the deprivation of fire is
not the original, savage condition of man, whom Prometheus helps
to get onto the path of civilization, but instead is already the doom
resulting from the gods' having been deceived. Consequently the theft
of fire in the hollow stem of a plant (narthex) must have been not so
much the stealing of an element that belongs only to heaven and to
the gods as, rather, frustration of the punishment, and mockery of
the god. The fact that the deprivation of fire is already the consequence
of an act that was unfriendly toward the gods conceals the hostility
of Zeus toward men that is founded in the gods' dynastic proceedings.
The idea, renewed by Horace, that there are elements in nature that
man has no right to, whose possession or mastery is sacrilege: water,
in the arrogance of seafaring, air, in the flight with Daedalus that ends
fatally for Icarus, and fire, in Prometheus's theft-this sketch of a
system, which spares only earth as an element fitting for man, seems
to have been originally foreign to the Prometheus story.
In the version given to it in Hesiod's Erga [Works and Days], the
etiology of work is connected to the gift of fire; the illegitimate easing
of life by means of the heavenly element is compensated for by the
toil of prolonging life with its aid. Entirely independent of this, in both
versions of the myth the epitome of all the misfortunes that man
suffered as a result of Prometheus's favors is the advent of woman.
She is, as it were, the god's counterdeception of mankind. Hephaestus,
the blacksmith-god, was given the job of creating a mirage that was
to combine stimulation of desire and lifelong vexation. If one disregards
a psychological account of the poet's reasons for describing the origin
of woman in this way, then the core of the poetic construction is the
strict symmetry of crime and punishment: With the same irrevocability
with which man had come into the possession of fire, he is committed,
through Pandora, to his sexuality. The poet sees this as a condition,
designed to be prone to illusion, in which man was to undergo what
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Zeus had been meant to undergo and had undergone when he was
exposed to ridicule by the theft of fire. The fact that Zeus concludes
his speech announcing man's punishment with scomfullaughter shows
that he has arrived at the goal of his desire for revenge.
What Hephaestus accomplishes with the ingenious demiurgic pro-
duction of Pandora is the correlate, in the realm of mechanics, of the
version according to which Prometheus himself, as the potter-god,
made men and put life into them with Athena's help. The Athenians
always denied that the tutelary goddess of their city provided more
than help for Prometheus-that she also loved him. In this way they
let it appear as though Zeus, in order to gloss over his passion for
revenge and his cruelty, in connection with Prometheus, had started
the rumor that Prometheus had been seduced into a love affair by
Athena. Thus everyone had to understand that the strongest means
of coercion were called for in order to protect the virgin goddess.
The Prometheus myth, whatever form it appears in, has culture-
critical implications. It is not a matter of indifference whether Zeus
regards men as a foreign relic, in his cosmos, of hostile gods, and
would rather they did not exist, so that he wants to make them
disappear into Hades and cease to be visible, like the other members
of the past dynasties, or whether men were attempting, using cunning
and knavery, to secure for themselves an advantage in the world and
an increased share of its products, contrary to old rights of the gods,
merely in order to provide themselves with a pleasant world. If the
theft of fire was Prometheus's defense against Zeus's desire to destroy
men, then this deed and those for whom it is done have the almost
self-evident justification of self-preservation; if it is the thwarting of a
punishment decreed by Zeus, then the culture that is made possible
by fire is originally founded on unjust gain and on illegitimate desires.
If Zeus, after the conflict over the sacrifice, not only withholds fire
but conceals their bios [life, means of living] from men, then what they
win, under Prometheus's protection, is self-preservation, but at the
same time they also, indirectly, provide themselves with more than
what was meant to be withheld from them. Thus the Erga explains
the origin of work as the result of an impoverishment of the world,
a world that had absolutely been intended to provide sustenance to
man: "For the gods keep hidden from men the means of life. Else
you would easily do work enough in a day to supply you for a full
year even without working. "d All of that operates on the level of
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punishment and ill will, certainly, but not of the will to destroy. Still,
men want more than just to live. .
The other aspect is a more nearly allegorical interpretation of the
withholding and conveyance of fire. Men are by nature stupid, like
the animals, not worthy of existence. Zeus wants to destroy them and
assumes that they cannot last in the state they are in. Then it is
Prometheus who first makes men into men. This 'deeper interpretation'
of the myth is already on the verge of interpreting fire as the faculty
of creation and invention, because it is a precondition of the trans-
formation and refInement of all materials from nature. Culture, then,
is a form both of instruction and of the awakening of self-initiated
action. Prometheus is not first the potter who makes men and then
the fire-bringer; rather, he creates men by means of fire; it is their
differentia specifica [specific difference], as it will be again in anthro-
pological paleontology.
The story of Pandora relates unmistakably to the theory of culture
that casts suspicion on the origin of abundance and of the superfluous.
In that connection the most striking characteristic of the gods' dis-
patching of woman would be the novelty - bewildering for a masculine
world that is to be pictured as warlike - of waste. What this adds is
a trifle, an annoyance, not a threat, in comparison to the secure
possession of fire and to the easing of the burden of sacrificial cults.
That is why the tendency toward the burlesque that adheres to the
figures of culture heroes and no doubt also to that of Prometheus can
pass over to Pandora: She brings the evils, but she does not take away
the gain, for which Prometheus takes responsibility. So one will not
be able to say that Prometheus achieved nothing for men in the end-
that each of his tricks was frustrated by a countertrick, most clearly
by the dispatching of Pandora. Considered seriously, that is nothing
in comparison to the acquisition of the definitive practicability of
eXIstence.
One can see what Hesiod strives for and would like to achieve, but
one also perceives the insuperable resistance of his mythical materiaL
The concealment of fire, of the bios, has gone to the heart of the
possibility of life. The Erga can depict the burden of this life and its
intensification by the extravagance of women, but it can and must
assume the elementary possibility of this life. To be sure, the figure
of Pandora becomes demonized in that her consequences go beyond
what is appropriate to Hesiod's portrayal of female characteristics, for
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Chapter 1
his male audience: Among the evils in the jar that she opened there
were, above all, "countless plagues that wander amongst men." But
even these are, as it were, fragments of Zeus's will to destroy, of which
Hesiod does not and cannot speak. For him the interpretation of
Pandora's name as "the all-giving one" is also no longer available,
since after all her jar only contains the worst part of everything. A
picture on a red-figured mixing jug kept in Oxford shows Pandora
with outspread arms, emerging from the earth: For an earth divinity
the name would be intelligible, as would be her demonization for the
singer's audience, loyal to Olympus.
Aeschylus, in his Prometheus trilogy, put the theme of tragedy in its
purest mythical form: It would be better for man not to exist. As a
formula, Bacchylides, in his fifth ode, first placed this in the mouth
of Hercules, who sheds tears one single time, in Hades, over the fate
of Meleager: "For mortals, the best thing is not to be born and not
to see the light of the sun." In Aeschylus's Prometheia, that holds not
as the irremediability of a subjective condition of despair but rather
as an objective finding of the myth, expressed not only in the new
god's intention to destroy the creatures produced by Cronus's gen-
eration but even in Prometheus's acknowledgment that that intention
is justified. It makes the myth into more than the mere story of the
successful assertion of the right of human beings to exist. Prometheus
enforces the revaluation of the contemptible species of one day into
a world magnitude that even Zeus could not make invisible again by
making it disappear in Hades. To have turned the objective worth-
lessness of human beings into more than their capacity to exist-into
their worthiness to exist-is an offense against the world order that
Prometheus himself does not deny.
The myth, as it is presented in the tragedy, does not even have the
suffering Titan assert a higher right justifYing the preservation of human
beings. Prometheus depicts this species as deserving, rather, to perish;
it was composed of thickheaded creatures, homeless troglodytes. If,
to be capable of survival, they had only lacked fire, then Zeus would
ha ve been wrong to despise them; but they lacked fire only as the
final step in completing and making feasible the skills that Prometheus
brought them, before which they had vegetated, bewildered, with dull
senses. The chorus of Oceanides fdaughters of Oceanusl is right: Pro-
metheus overrates human beings. But he was only able to 'create'
thein because he had pulled them out of complete \vorthlessness. He
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could not provide them with any legitirD:acy in Zeus's cosmos, but he
could make it impossible for Zeus to implement his verdict that they
were not worthy of existence. If Zeus had wanted to drive the humans
to despair so as to make them bring about their own obliteration from
the cosmos, Prometheus had frustrated this by giving them a reality,
fire, and an illusion, "blind hope." The illusionary element points to
the fact that it could not be a question purely of making the humans
happy; they were deceived about their status naturalis [natural state],
and that also was a misfortune.
Aeschylus found a solution to the difficulties that Hesiod had still
had with hope, this most obstinate of human characteristics. In the
Pandora story the woman's curiosity had let all the evils escape and
descend upon mankind; only hope was left behind, for the woman
who was stricken with horror, in the jar that had been her dowry. As
an illusionary connection to the future, hope would originally have
been one of the evils; but, precisely as such, would it not have been
allowed to have its effect? As the real prospect of better futures it
would scarcely have belonged among the evils in Pandora's dowry.
Here, then, Hesiod evidently had not fully worked out how to deal
with his inherited obligatory material.
The tragic writer homogenizes this for the first time by means of
the simple device of making Prometheus the author of a subjective
will to existence, on the part of human beings, in opposition to their
objective existential state: by means of hope. To the chorus, which
stands around the fettered one compassionately, he admits his most
radical piece of cunning: keeping back from human beings the ground-
lessness of their existence. No doubt in order to persuade them to
accept fire, he had prevented them, by means of the blindness of
hope, from looking their true lot in the eye. For he admits this even
before he speaks of having given them the fire with which they were
still supposed - at the moment that this is being said - to be about to
discover many skills. Prometheus does, a t bottom, what the gods also
do elsewhere in [Greek] tragedy: He acts by inducing delusion. "Blind
hopes" are his form of ate [folly, delusion].
So trickery is involved when humans survive in the world. It would
not have been enough to make them a present of one thing or another;
they had to arrive at the point of gaining new possibilities for themselves.
True, this becomes an affront to Zeus and to his intention of bringing
human beings to what, in his view, is the best thing for them: not to
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exist at all. But the trick does not deceive the god, only the humans.
That is proclaimed by the chorus, which while it is full of compassion
for the suffering friend of the humans, puts him in the wrong in the
conflict with Zeus. It shares Zeus's verdict regarding the unworthiness
of the humans to exist in the world. The chorus does what is appropriate
in the circumstances: It comforts, but it does not excuse.
If this is a tragedy in which, in an extreme intensification of the
'givens' of the myth, the issue is not only man's contented existence
but also the prevention of his nonexistence, that nevertheless does
not make man himself an actor in the drama. Friedrich Schlegel was
to take offense at the fact that the hero of the tragedy is a god, even
though its subject is the existence of man. But only if a god stood up
to the son of Cronus could the conflict over mankind arise at all, and
end for them in a reliable, consistent way. For only a god could survive
the deadliness of the punishment, could become a monument to the
indestructibility of mankind and force Zeus into what is called, in the
language of politics, the "recognition of accomplished facts." He who
stepped forward to resist the destruction of mankind had to be in-
destructible. Those who were indirectly affected by this decision had
no business in the arena where it was made. The fact is already given
expression in the ancient Hypothesis ['argument': introductory summary],
when it describes as characteristic of this, as of other tragedies by
Aeschylus, that it is not only splendid and important figures that fill
the scene, but exclusively gods: theia panta prosopa, and, moreover,
only the most venerable among them: presbutatoi ton theon.
Now one of the figures of the tragedy is not a god, though at the
end of her journey she was elevated to divinity by the Egyptians. This
is 10, the daughter of the river god Inachus, who is turned into a doe
by Hera, out of jealousy, and is pursued through the world by a gadfly.
In her flight she falls into the Scythian wilderness in which Prometheus
suffers his banishment from intercourse with and sight of human
beings. As Hephaestus, the underling who carries out the sentence,
says, Prometheus is permitted to perceive neither the sound nor the
form of the mortals, having "too great love" for whom had been the
motive leading to his transgression. Persecuted 10 presents herself to
him in all her misery - two victims of the Olympians face one another.
At the same time Prometheus's function of providing an escape from
the persecution of the new gods is paradigmatically displayed. The
Titan becomes lo's helper in her flight and Zeus's accuser before the
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chorus, which, after the guilty victim, no:v has the innocent one before
it. The importance of the 10 scene for the argument leaps out: The
objective justice of Zeus's position with respect to Prometheus, based
on the worthlessness of human beings in their original condition, falls
into ambiguity as a result of the way in which he so manifestly functions
like a brutal tyrant toward others - and perhaps, therefore, toward
all.
Contrary to those who despise the 10 scene of the tragedy - above
all, contrary to those who thought they had to deny Aeschylus's au-
thorship of the play entirely, on account of it-it must be accorded
the highest respect. Not to rest satisfied with the warding off of the
divine intention of destroying mankind, but to show the restitution of
trust in existence in a figure, in the mortal woman who is tragically
deprived of the meaning of her life, was an idea endowed with pure
significance, full of metaphysical consolation in view of the vision of
the self-refutation of the tyrannical world god, for whom his first
glimpse of the abyss was still in store.
When she encounters Prometheus, 10, in her deer shape, is on the
edge of despair, at the end of her will to live. What would be gained
by going on living, she asks, and arrives at the conclusion arrived at
by all the figures of tragedy, that it would be better- if it is too late
to be allotted the fate never to have existed-to end her torment once
and for all. Then, admittedly, Zeus would have carried out this, too,
of his threats - that he would destroy the line of Inachus, the founder
of the dynasty of Argos. So in this encounter Prometheus is in the
same situation as he was with the whole species of human beings.
What he had not yet wanted to venture on their behalf becomes
unavoidable for him as a result of seeing lo's despair: to shout aloud
his mother Gaea's secret that there may be an end to Zeus's tyranny.
An important feature, here, is that he has already possessed, and
protected, this foreknowledge, rather than receiving it now for the
first time, ad hoc.
But the most important transformation or final formation of the
myth consists, not in the fact that his own liberation would not have
been enough to bring him to apply his most decisive instrument against
Zeus, but rather in the ambiguous content of the prophecy itself. Since,
as a result of the warning, Zeus will not take the fatal step of begetting
a son lnore powerful than himself, the poet and his audience must
be credited with the ability to understand the prophecy of the fall of
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the tyrant metaphorically as well: Prometheus will make an end of

the tyranny by taming the ruler. 10 herself, if it is to be possible for
her to be consoled in her extremest desperation, may and must under-
stand the visionary decree in its drastic, literal sense. The desperation
of human beings ends where the god experiences the limits of his
power.
Prometheus, then, is not only the unbending sufferer, who dem-
onstrates his immortality on the crag as defiance, but also the one
who insists on repeating his action-as between the deception in sac-
rifice and the theft of fire, so also between saving mankind and saving
the persecuted individual- and thus claims general validity for the
deed, the punishment of which he suffers. He shows the horned 10
the path of her future, prophetically decribing to her the long flight
all the way to the Nile delta, where she will become the mother of a
new race. After her retransformation into human form she will have
a son from Zeus-Epaphus-whom he begets in a more restrained
manner than otherwise, namely, by merely touching her back. In this
way, also, he provides his detyrannization in his relation to her.
Another deep meaning on the part of the poet is contained in the
fact that by saving 10, Prometheus saved the ancestress of his future
liberator. Stepping far back, he sets up this construction and combines
with it an indication of the multiplicity of generations that would still
be necessary and the distance to be covered by their descendants
down to Alcmene. She, once again by Zeus, will become the mother
of Hercules. This penetration of the depths of time gives an idea-
almost a direct perception-of the length of the Titan's torment even
after he threatens Zeus with the secret from Gaea. Myth, after all,
has no other concept of time but that of the piling up of generations,
across which the long-term actions and reactions take place. 10 is a
victim of the young tyrant; but her name already opens a prospect
of a last time when Zeus will make a mortal woman yield to him-
after Alcmene, and after the potent offspring of this most subtle and
artful deception, he will no longer trust himself to beget sons without
danger. When he kills Zeus's lightning-eagle, this Hercules already
bears the mark (no doubt only subsequently toned down) of rebellion,
or at least of the demonstration that the god's power is reduced.
Just as Prometheus's action points far into the future, its roots reach
equally far back into the past. Consequently the poet augmented the
mythical genealogy, going all the way to the primeval beginning:
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Prometheus-bypassing a generation, that of Iapetus and Clymene-

is a direct offspring of Gaea, the original mother (whose origin was
in Chaos) of all dynasties. That is the source of his foreknowledge of
the destinies of the world of the gods, which is decisive in his con-
frontation with Zeus. Zeus has to send his messenger, Hermes, to the
criminal on the rock, to press him-like an extortionist, threatening
him with lightning-to surrender his knowledge of the future of the
gods. When Prometheus boasts of having helped Zeus already in his
seizure of power, he shows how his power, which now appears so
feeble, carried aloft the Olympian, who now appears just as over-
whelming as Prometheus is weak. His own story encompasses that of
Zeus, as though the latter were a mere dynastic episode.
The turning that led to victory in the struggle with the Titans had
resulted from the fact that Prometheus's brothers preferred to rely
on their strength rather than on his counsel, whereas he himself,
following the primeval knowledge of his mother, counts on cunning
as against force. That is meant to indicate that Zeus, in his confrontation
with Prometheus, is close to repeating the Titans' mistake, by treating
his ally and adviser as an insubordinate rival. As a political reflex,
Aeschylus makes the chorus of the Oceanides lament the fact that
there is a sickness in the nature of tyrannis [absolute power] that makes
it mistrust its tried friends and rely on clients and favorites. It is also
supposed to have been their flattery and acclamation, then, that made
Zeus plan to put a creation worthy of the new dynasty in place of the
human species. Prometheus upset this calculation.
Right at the beginning of Prometheus Bound the spectator learns from
the mouth of Cratus [Strength], who together with Bia [Force] drags
the prisoner to the rock, that not only must justice be executed against
the Titan, in the name of the gods, but also a lesson must be imparted:
Prometheus should submit to Zeus's tyrannis and have done with his
philanthropos tropos [habit of being friendly to man]. In other words, he
has a chance to change his ways. That makes clear the point that he
who is a tyrant in the beginning will himself be different in the end.
It cannot be the sheer coercion of fear that is at work when Zeus
becomes reconciled to sanctioning the right of humans to exist, and
to committing himself to law. Otherwise his word would not have the
dependability that has to result from this confrontation. Zeus himelf
must become the being "friendly to man" that Prometheus was not
supposed to be. That requires time; Prometheus does ~ot precipitate
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it by exhausting his knowledge. He wants - according to his own

forrnulation-to use the present tyche[chance, fortune] to release Zeus's
phronema [mind, will, spirit] from anger in the future. His liberation
from punishment, alone, could not accomplish his purpose for men,
if Zeus's own history does not move him to acquiesce in men's existence.
The process of the division of powers takes on a more didactic character:
The parties give each other lessons.
- The tragedy has to suggest the long path through time that is a
precondition of giving and receiving lessons. It is, first of all and above
all, Prometheus's stubbornness that has to be made clear, because it
guarantees that he will not disclose his secret in return for the smallest
success, that of his own release. What he announces to 10, for her
consolation-what he boasts of more and more loudly to the chorus,
with almost ostentatious confidence - he does not in fact reveal all
that thoughtlessly. He knows what a prospect of success is contained
in the great temporal extent of his own suffering, which is intensified
still more after his capitulation-parley with Hermes and his deriding
of Hermes's servile disposition, by his being hurled into Tartarus and
by the daily torture administered by the eagle that feeds on his body.
What he suffers now, he suffers not for the deception in sacrifice and
the theft of fire but in order to gain the time for the final taming of
the superior Olympian power. Everything is designed to show that
from now on he suffers as a result of his own decision, that he waits
for Hercules, and for the reliable change in the other.
That there can be nothing definitive and final in the sequence of
the ages and dynasties, that even a Zeus must be capable of being
overthrown, is deeply rooted in the logic of myth, even if the ruling
god does finally avoid the risk of the further begetting of rivals. He
cannot escape the fact that it is not by his nature but rather out of
resignation and caution that he evades a test of the fragility of his
power and resists the compulsion to repeat, which myth may derive
from its affinity to the ritual of worship. The Prometheia presupposes
this idea, but only in order to give it a last twist on behalf of the
ground of mankind's existence: If Zeus were willing to become the
guarantor of their existence, he would be spared the blind sowing of
destruction. Strictly speaking, Aeschylus describes for his audience the
education of Zeus for the role of the last of the ruling gods, without
presupposing Hesiod's trust in Zeus's attributes.
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For that purpose the failure of a furt~er rebellion is not needed,

but only the refusal of submission, the resistance that continues through
millenniums, even under the most extreme intensification of torture-
the obstinacy of one who knows, who can wait for the hour of the
final division of powers. The persecution of 10 is at the same time the
demonstration of the fact that the deus novus [new god] has not yet
matured to the point where he could see in Prometheus more than
the bearer of a secret to be extorted. When Prometheus, left alone
again by 10, falls into bragging about the certainty of Zeus's future
abasement, he initiates a test of strength that has nothing directly to
do either with 10' s fate or wit~ mankind's: Nothing concerns him less,
he says, than this Zeus, who in any case won't rule over the gods
much longer. Such certainty calls up Hermes, whose rejection, irre-
spective of anything else, brings the test of strength to a crisis. It is,
again, an instance of the poet's vividness that it is only now that Zeus's
lightning-eagle takes over the execution of the most terrible
punishment.
After the insulting rejection of Hermes, the relation between Zeus
and Prometheus is no longer that of the punishing authority to a
culprit who is persectuted for having aided human beings; he had
already suffered for that by being banished and put in chains. What
happens now, at the end of Prometheus Bound, is a heterogeneous
confrontation, in which the only remaining issue is the continuation
of Zeus's power. Nothing remains from what went before except the
open struggle for existence, decided by the various means belonging
to the two sides. Prometheus seems to be the most dangerous rival
as long as he has not revealed who that rival will really be one day.
"Time, as it grows old, teaches all things"e is his answer to Hermes-
an answer that is expressive of the staying power of a myth that has
to let the new god grow old if there is to be a prospect of success for
human beings.
What we know of the Prometheus Luomenos [Prometheus unbound],
from the fragments that have survived, is at least that the chorus is
filled with fraternal Titans instead of with disapproving Oceanides.
Zeus must have released them after their imprisonment in Tartarus;
Prometheus will have brought them up with him out of the undervvorld,
after his descensus ad iriferos. f For this purpose the poet must have him
hurled into the depths, with lightning and thunder, at the end of the
first part. Evidently he did not want to advertise the change in the
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world situation only through the appearance of Hercules and his pe-
remptory deed in killing Zeus's bird (for us, an unmistakable substitute
action, taking the place of patricide). The change of morals required
the positing of a new law, the persuasion of Prometheus by his primeval
mother, Gaea, who will have released him from the obligation to keep
her prophecy secret, and will have done this at a late hour, only in
view of the change in Zeus.
-Thus the chorus of Titans stand for the fact that Zeus has solved
his 'generational problem' (of which Hesiod did not yet know anything,
though I daresay Pindar did): He has released his father, Cronus, from
Tartarus, and appointed him ruler of the Islands of the Blessed. Pro-
metheus cannot benefit from the amnesty granted to the Titans, be-
cause his conflict with Zeus is not the result of that old rivalry about
who would rule the gods-in which he had after all been Zeus's ally-
but rather of the threat of a future rebellion the outcome of which
was preestablished, and to the withholding of the knowledge that was
needed in order to avoid it.
The poet exhibits the Prometheus who has been thrown into the
depths and afterward is hacked at by the eagle as one driven to despair.
He too now becomes conscious of the central complaint of tragedy,
that it would be better not to have existed. Prometheus will have explicitly
complained that from him even the outlet of no longer existing is withheld.
There has been much puzzling over this placement of the central
complaint of tragedy in the mouth of an immortal. To me the poet's
intention seems most likely to have been that of identifying Prometheus
with the desperation of human beings and thus preventing his phi-
lanthropic role from being forgotten in his Titanic obstinacy. We do
not know what importance the appearance of Gaea had in Prometheus
Unbound; she must have broken down his obstinacy by persuasion.
For the second play of the trilogy is evidently set in a world of per-
suasion, as the first was in a world of force. That represents the
function of myth in the form with which the Greeks were most familiar.
If Prometheus was supposed to believe that it was the will of Zeus
not to grant him mortality, that would also have had a relation to the
situation of the Olympian, who simply could not have allowed the
keeper of the secret of his fate to die, even if he had been able to.
Would Prometheus, then, have consented to surrender the secret be-
cause he expected, in return, the satisfaction of his am or mortis [love
of death]?
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Only if it were not the case that ev~rything is oriented toward

Prometheus's mission for mankind, which is fulfilled in the third play
of the trilogy -Prometheus Pyrphoros [Prometheus the fire-bringer], as
the story of the origin of his Attic cult celebration - could we listen
further to the conjecture that he ministered to the eternity of Zeus's
regime for the sake of his own destruction. To be sure, the pure
representation of the meaning of tragedy in the desire not to exist
would have expanded beyond all bounds in the god's illusion that this
could finally fall to his lot, too, as the clemency of the hostile god
whom he saved.
Prometheus's deluded desire not to exist is, in the economy of the
drama, the pendant to the blind hope with which he had preserved
human beings from despair. Gaea must have shown Prometheus that
the unjustifiable illusionism of that blind hope - and similarly his con-
tinued existence as the friendly guardian of their fire places-had in
the meantime become more realistic as a result of Zeus's moderation.
We must still glance at the role of Hercules. No doubt he does not
come to Prometheus with the specific intention of an act of liberation.
Rather, while passing by in the course of carrying out the tasks he
had to perform in order to qualify as a god, he will have comprehended
the monstrous character of the scene and killed the eagle. It has been
said that it could not have been fitting for him finally to loose the
Titan's chains as well. But the killing of the eagle may be the weightier
deed. The eagle was, after all, not only punishment for something
that was prohibited but also Zeus's means of combating the opponent
of his regime. It is not a small matter when Hercules handles his
father's lightning-eagle like one of the other monsters and Zeus does
not dare to punish this. No doubt he would not have prevented the
greatest and last of his sons from unchaining Prometheus, either-
but Hercules is not even allowed to have thought of this: His mind
was on monsters, not on benevolence.
No, it is not because Hercules would not have been permitted to
do this that he does not take the chains off the Titan, but because
this had to be done by Zeus himself as the completion of his detyr-
annization. Zeus is not to be surprised from outside and from below,
but rather to act in a way that expresses the moderation that he has
acquired. If the liberation had been completed by Hercules, it would
have anticipated the late invention of the deus ex machina by Euripides,
which Siegfried Melchinger interpreted, no doubt correctly, as the
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expression of an ultimate unseriousness, an ironical suspension of the

tragic entanglement. It is true that that is a legitimate way of dealing
with myth, but it is foreign to Aeschylus and cannot be the last word
of the world- and time-encompassing conflict of his Prometheia. Instead
of that, he has the satyr play, Prometheus Pyrkaeus [Prometheus the fire-
kindler1.
The title of this satyros [satyric drama], which is supposed to have
been presented as the conclusion of the Persians, has the ambiguity
that is suitable to the genre: It signifies the "originator" of fire, in the
sense of the bringer of salvation, but also in the sense of the "arsonist."
The Greeks always had an awareness of the ambivalence of the ben-
efactions of their gods. According to Deichgraber's conjectures the
satyros that was aimed at Prometheus contained a scene in which the
satyrs, full of curiosity, crowd around the fire, which as yet is unknown
to them, and observe its brightness with delight, only to apprehend
immediately and painfully that it is all too easy to bum oneself. There
are vase paintings of Prometheus bringing fire, with enthusiastic satyrs
dancing around him and grabbing for the narthex [giant fennel] stalk.
In one of the surviving fragments the talk is of an injured satyr, and
by all indications it was a bum that had to be dealt with there.
At the Dionysia, after the three-part tragedy with its horrible and
frightening things decreed against men by the gods, the satyros had
to change the exhausted spectators' mood to one of welcome relief.
The result did not need to be a coherent 'total work of art'
[Gesamtkunstwerk1. Thus in the Persians there is nothing pointing ahead
to Prometheus the Arsonist, as is the case in other tetralogies as well. In
the satyros, at any rate, the poet did not need to decide whether he
wanted to represent Prometheus's foundation of culture more as
friendliness to man or as an outrage against the gods. The donation
itself appears in its ambiguity as a gift and a danger, but neither of
these is located in the dimension of salvation or doom. The metaphor
that is hinted at here for the first time, that bringers of light are also
unavoidably bringers of fire, only served at a late date to express
doubts as to whether the truth is worth the price of the conflagrations
that it can ignite.
It is frivolous to suppose that this satyros of Prolnetheus the flre-
bringer and arsonist could have been the most poetic piece arnong
the ancient transformations of the Inyth. For one Inoment, the \vork
on the rnyth may have seemed already to be cOlnplete-that is the
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essence of its moments of evidence. The dancing satyrs with their

singed beards are the final transformation of what had begun with
the chorus of the Oceanides and its disapproval and had been reflected
upon with the chorus of the liberated Titans, even though this satyros
was hardly performed in connection with the Prometheia. Jacob Burck-
hardt cautiously posed the question, in connection with the comic
characteristics of the life of the gods even in Homer, on which the
later burlesquing of the gods depends: "Does the path out of the
fearsome into the beautiful sometimes lead through the comic? "g Part
of the command of poetry "over the whole conception of gods" among
the Greeks after Homer and Hesiod, for Burckhardt, is the fact that
the soul "from early on sought to raise itself up above fear of the
supernaturaL" On the path of this effort "the daylight of the liberating
epic song dawned, perhaps all at once, as a result of an unexpected
uplift." In this process it had been the poets of the great epics "who
above all transformed the gods into beings who resembled men-
though at the same time they were entirely marvelous-and freed
them from their grotesque appearance while also freeing the listening
people from fear." In the course of this depletion of power by means
of myth and the poetry that works on myth, the form that has the
greatest ease is the most difficult to achieve: Beauty may in fact be
something that can never be arrived at except by a passage through
the 'shaking-off process of the comic. In the language of Aristotle's
theory of tragedy: Catharsis can be experienced as aesthetic facility.
This sort of 'playing down' makes Prometheus, too, into a figure
of comedy. In many mythologies of diverse culture circles, the pro-
totypical culture founders have been brought down to the level of
roguish, often grotesque figures. There is already reason for that in
the fact that an original craftiness has to be ascribed to them if they
are to succeed in providing for men against the will of more powerful
gods. This fundamental schema belongs to the mythical scenery on
this side of the absolutism of reality; it serves to interpret man's ex-
perience, which includes both the endangerment of his earthly existence
by inaccessible powers and the improbable bearableness of life that
is nevertheless achieved. There has to be one who does not have to
be taken as seriously as the great offices that administer destiny and
who nevertheless makes life possible.
But no myth would be credible that made this happen in the easiest,
and therefore the least dependable, way. The friend of humans who
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is near to or equal to the gods must be rebellious and steadfast in

relation to those above him, affable and untiring in relation to those
below. To reconcile character traits is not the business of myth, so
the compatibility of attributes does not need to be established.
But the sly and artful adversary of the ruling gods, who seems to
mock their power and who dares to play tricks on them, is risky as
a partner for men too. Consequently it is important, in the process
of the general lowering of the level of mythical frightfulness, not only
that someone plays a joke on the higher ones but also that humans,
in dealing with him, venture a measure of provocative familiarity, that
they in tum can have some fun with the friend of mankind. A cult is
always a pattern for its inversion, veneration for provocation and
excessive demands: One must be able to make sure and to show on
what good terms one stands with the friend of mankind.
Once [Greek] tragedy had given the figure of Prometheus its full
seriousness, the greatness-marked by inescapability-of the desire
not to exist, one no longer needed to fear that the fate of hubris that
was endured on behalf of men and against the god would be capable
of being distorted or neglected by a cult festival or torchbearers' race,
or even by comedy. Conscientiousness includes looking at the story
as a whole and from every point of view. The poet of the epic synopsis
of the gods had still not concerned himself at all about Prometheus's
later fate. It did not seem so inappropriate to him that this braggart
should have disappeared from the stage of the Olympians for good.
In the Attic cult, Prometheus's position was so central that what one
could least of all afford was indifference, whatever the opposite of
that might be.
Both [Greek] tragedy and comedy enjoy the protection of a kind of
immunity, as part of the cult. Comedy avails itself of this license with
less respect, and exercises it with less restraint. Of a work by Cratinus
entitled Ploutoi h we have, as remains, only one papyrus. If the comedy
is thought to have been presented as early as before 435 B.C., its
distance from Aeschylus's Prometheia in time was scarcely three decades,
perhaps only two. But what we would have before us, according to
the conjectures that have been made, is more than a parody of the
tragedy. We have to picture the chorus of Titans once again, here
called ploutoi and now in the very situation that had been prophesied
by Gaea as the disaster that would befall Zeus if he failed to avoid it:
He has been overthrown, and according to the text that has been
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preserved, the demos [the people] rules. T~e change of regime has set
the ploutoi free for the first time, and they have come to Athens to
the altar of their brother Prometheus, who, decrepit from his many
sufferings, eats the bread of charity that belongs to the established
god of the Attic artisans. Although the Titan's struggle has, then, gone
even further than in the tragedy, the situation is evidently a melancholy
one. True, Zeus has been overthrown, but taken as a whole, the new
ochlocracy has left the gods no pleasure from their dynastic fluctuations.
The struggle was as futile as it was successful. This conjectural com-
pletion of the picture may go a bit too far, but the extent of the playful
destruction of the mythical material must have been remarkable. Pro-
metheus as a pensioner of the Athenians, the Titans out visiting rel-
atives - that is the idyll as the twilight of the gods.
In Aristophanes's Birds, Prometheus enters the scene when Peith-
etairos, by building the city in the clouds, has cut off the supply of
nourishment, from the smoke of sacrifices, to the gods. By starving
the gods, the birds expect to regain the dominion over the world that
is due to them. Iris, the messenger of the gods, has already proclaimed
Zeus's intention of revenge. At that very point Prometheus appears,
just as punctual as he is competent, to advise the humans. He has
more accurate knowledge than anyone else about the potential conflicts
in the system of the gods. Even if only the barbarians' gods are still
able to threaten Zeus, still it will be all the easier to provoke them
against him when they are prevented from partaking of sacrifices. An
embassy from the gods also falters over the question of food. The
outcome of the political dealing is that the apotheosis of the birds no
longer changes anything, but only confirms an established state of
affairs, in which the power of the gods had already become unprofitable.
True, the efforts of men in making sacrifices, which had flagged for
a long time, are revived on behalf of the birds, and after their siege
is raised the gods share, parasitically, in the surplus value. But being
a god is no longer something special when so many want to enjoy a
god's privileges and so few pay the tribute that produces the enjoyment.
Now the joke of the topsy-turvy world is that the onetime fearless
Titan, Prometheus, appears, in-of all conditions-these, where his
enemies' power has broken down, as a fainthearted sissy. The culture
hero who, in the mask of the jester, extracts what is still left for men
in spite of the jealousy of the gods, escapes the divine surveillance
not so much by cunning and slyness as by costuming. His freedom
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is that of the fool, which has always left him free to do-for, and in,
one moment more-what is otherwise strictly forbidden by power. It
is the role of the sinner, already ready to repent and do penance,
who once more, in the night before the great fast, applies himself to
sinful activities as though to a duty, and evades divine omniscience,
otherwise thought to be constant, by means of his mask. For the
spec~ator of the comedy, the persecution of Prometheus has degen-
erated into a harmless hide-and-seek, with all the characteristics of
neurotic delusion on the part of the persecutee, which has long since
made him forget his own triumph. Anxiously suppressing the god's
name, the disguised Prometheus, covering himself with a parasol, asks
the man whether he can see "a god" behind him. The one who is
asked answers - the joke being his inability to suppress the name-
that, "by Zeus," he sees nothing. The immortal, in tum, makes himself
ridiculous with the sentence, which he could not have spoken in the
tragedy, that it will be the death of him if Zeus sees him here in the
camp of the besiegers. Playing on Prometheus's name, Peithetairos
compliments him that that was "cleverly provided for. "i This is the
stature of the herald who is supposed to announce the decline and
end of Zeus's power. Nevertheless, he performs his function for the
spectator, here as in the tragedy. In this world of timidity and tom-
foolery the reality of the gods becomes a friendly background when
the old enmity is now merely invoked, by Prometheus's speaking of
the hatred for the gods in his breast and receiving the man's confir-
mation that, "by Zeus," he has always been a god-hating man. The
faded recollection of the mythical pattern itself, its manifest loss of
identity as a means employed in comedy, belongs in the category of
reception that we call "bringing to an end."
The old friend of mankind has turned into a doubtful political figure.
He who once stole fire is now a petty traitor; when he comes on the
scene of the cloud city he comes directly from Olympus, where he
has been given the rights of a native. He is no less paltry as a conspirator,
since he incites others to revolt and urges them to persist while he
himself evades the consequences. In every way, what was once re-
sistance to tyranny has degenerated into the mere intrigue of a late
age of banal conflicts. Even the great gift of fire no longer seems great.
The climax of the contrast to the mythical tradition is arrived at when
Prometheus reminds the man of his benevolence and gets the ans\ver,
"That's right, people bake fish on that fire of yours." To judge the
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Part III
monstrousness of the attack on the senti!llents of the audience, one

has to bring to mind how familiar the image of the rebel and the
sufferer was to it.
It is surprising that up to this point there has been no need to speak
of Prometheus the potter who made human beings. It was bound to
be a source of disappointment that this trait, which had such important
consequences in the reception of the myth, could be such a late addition
as the state of the sources declares it to be. Nor has it let the philologists
rest from the effort to attribute to the fundamental contents of the
myth the forming at least of human beings of the male sex from clay.
Wolf Aly postulates a text originating in the middle of the seventh
century B.C. that goes beyond what we find in Hesiod and in tragedy
in this respect. But this neglect of the fact that the earliest use made
of such an important datum is in the fourth century B.C. cannot be
accepted. By coming to terms with the fact that the formation of
human beings was not originally part of the myth that encompasses
so much of the history of gods and men, we arrive at the possibility
of understanding it as a consistent extension of the myth. The process
may have been assisted, intuitively, by the fact that Prometheus had
become the god of potters, or had been amalgamated with such a
god, and that people had before them the way in which the power
of his fire also made possible the production of ceramics in animal
and human form.
What is more important is that the supplementing of the myth
contains an assignment of motive, that is, it already practices a bit of
'mythology' [i.e., study or interpretation of myth], which had to have
been foreign to the archaic content. The elevation of Prometheus to
the demiurge who produces human beings makes comprehensible his
readiness - otherwise so difficult to explain, though not at first needing
to be explained, either-to take upon himself unheard-of things on
their behalf, as his creatures. The intensification of his sufferings, in
tragedy, required an elaboration of the figure that went beyond friv-
olous entanglement in the consequences of the deceptive sacrifice and
the theft of fire. In the case of the mere provocations of the divinity
it could seem as though the fa vors granted to human beings were
only incidental side effects, intended not so much to favor them as
to annoy the tyrant. It is true that tragedy found the formula, as a
censure of Prometheus, that he had had all too much love for human
beings, but it gave no reason for that. That he had not left the product
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Chapter 1
of his hands in the lurch appears, then, as a secondary rationalization

of the myth.
If one looks at it from the opposite direction, one can see Pro-
metheus's modeling of human beings as a hyperbolic representation
of his establishment of culture. His late installation as the author of
the human species would be an extrapolation of the increases in the
neces_sity of the Titan for the humans' existence that epic and tragic
poetry had produced. Man's extremely needy and pitiful initial state
had induced the chorus of Oceanides, in Aeschylus, to reproach Pro-
metheus with overestimating man; but precisely this low initial level
allows him to enumerate the whole catalog of his life-promoting ben-
efactions, which are, exactly, what is added to nature. The benefactor,
by confirming Zeus's contempt for human beings, keeps at a distance
from the responsibility of a creator. He is the "foreign god," whose
motive in espousing the cause of the forlorn beings is, precisely, love,
because it is not duty and obligation-just as will be the case with
Marcion's foreign god half a millennium later. If Prometheus had
already, at this point, been the humans' maker, the fact that his
responsibility had originated in that way would only have served to
unmask him before the chorus. The humans are a pitiful and dis-
creditable legacy of the fallen generation of gods, suited to justifying
that generation's departure; but it remains unclear whether Cronus' s
dynasty can be said to have a demiurgic connection with the origin
of the humans or whether they merely carry on, in themselves, the
general state of the world prior to the 'cosmos.'
Prometheus stands up for what has come down from the Titans,
even though he himself deprived that dynasty of its vindication by
assisting in its downfall. But the new god must, all the more, not be
permitted everything. The preservation of the human race, which
prevents the novice from representing himself, tyrannically, by a com-
peting race, becomes an identification, which from this point onward
could not be expressed more elegantly than as the result of demiurgic
responsibility. But since it was first expressed this way by comedy,
the possibility cannot be excluded that the point \vas not so much to
lay claim to the creator's protection and accomplishment as to ridicule
the weaknesses and blemishes of his creatures. At any rate, the contrast
that is brought out between the worthlessness of hurnans and the
production of the possibility of life for them brings us to the threshold
of this conjecture. If man is indebted to Prometheus for everything
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Part III
that he is, it is no longer a surprising le~p to make Prometheus into

the demiurge of the species and thus to make pottery into the metaphor
for all acts of original production. Prometheus becomes the figulus
saeculi novi [shaper of a new age].
This assignment of mythical roles may not have been entirely in-
convenient to the 'theology' of Zeus, either. After all, it carries with
it relief from responsibility for the dubious creature, man. Ultimately,
in Plato's myth, Zeus will be endowed with the generosity of having
given human beings what Prometheus himself could not have given
them: their position as citizens in the polis.
The supplementation of the potter who made human beings by
Athena as the dispenser of life for the ceramic bodies must have been
invented still later. Her role may have been developed by analogy to
the one she had played in connection with the theft of fire. The
possibility cannot be excluded that it is a case of induction from the
complex surrounding Pandora. For there, already in Hesiod, all the
gods had taken pains to make the deception attractive to Epimetheus.
Only since Lucian does Athena supplement Prometheus and legitimate
his work, as a daughter of Zeus, by dispensing souls. The use of this
motif on sarcophagi points to a connection with the belief in immor-
tality, for which the Titan's merely demiurgic work, with its dubious
legality, may not have been sufficient to guarantee the future contin-
uance and the fate of the soul beyond the body and the body's grave.
Translator's Notes
a. The dramatic fragment Prometheus, which Goethe wrote in the autumn of 1 773 (developing
ideas and taking over a few lines from the ode of the same name that he had written that
spring), presents Prometheus as a rebellious son of Zeus: Goethe, Werke, ed. E. Beutler (Mlmich:
Artemis, 1948-), vol. 4, pp. 185-197.
b. Hesiod (in the Theogony 535-560) describes how Prometheus tried to trick Zeus by offering
him the artfully arranged skin of an ox, containing only its bones and some fat, while he hid
the meat and the organs in an ox's stomach and gave it to men.
c. "Storm and stress" is the title given to a literary movement of the 1770s and 1780s in which
the youthful Goethe and Schiller played leading roles.
d. Hesiod, Homeric Hymns. and Hom erica , trans. H. G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 5.
327
Chapter 1
e. Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 1.982, trans.J. Scully and C. J. Herington (New York and London:
Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 77.
f Descent to those below, namely, the dead. This is the phrase that is applied to Jesus' supposed
descent into hell to bring salvation to those who died before he came into the world.
g. J. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte, in Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Rutten und Loening,

1955- ), vol. 6, p. 34n. The following quotations in this paragraph are from pp. 33-34 of the
same volume.
h. "Wealths," personified by the chorus.
i. The name Prometheus in Greek means "forethought" or "providence."

2
Sophists and Cynics:
Antithetical Aspects of the
Prometheus Material
Thus the gods justify the life of human beings, by living it themselves-
the only satisfactory theodicy!
-Nietzsche
Although Prometheus as the modeler of man is first attested, in lit-

erature, in the comedies of Philemon and Menander, nevertheless this
intensification of his role as donor of the good things of life into that
of the one who produces the species belongs among the logical con-
sequences of Sophism. The tendency of its high esteem for the figure
of the Titan converges with that of its theory of culture and its an-
thropology. In the relation between nature and art, for Sophism, the
share of nature in the formation and development of man diminishes
and the influence of artificial and artful practices on the way he is
established in the world correspondingly increases. That also holds as
a normative principle: The furnishing of rhetorical and political behavior
with its rules and arts presupposed the rolling back of obligations that
were based in nature, as what is simply given and authoritative.
Plato gave what was no doubt a parody of Sophism's method of
justification when, in the Sophistes [Sophist], he constructed the great
argument concerning the Eleatic disjunction that there is nothing but
what is and what is not. From this it follows that even a delusjon
produced by demogoguery would have to be counted on the side of
what is, because whatever it is, it cannot be placed on the side of
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Chapter 2
what is not. In the caricature of this argument, something of the logic

of all aesthetic self-foundations is anticipated: If the images cannot be
saved, by the concession that they merely resemble the truth [or are
"probable": wahrscheinlichl, from being defamed as lies, then they seize
the aura of truth for themselves and claim to be its sole possessors.
As the protagonist of a theory of the origin of culture that was
specific to a school, Prometheus, for Sophism, came into the neigh-
borhood of allegory for the first time. This was to be one of his future
destinies. With the Sophists, the unit of theory dealing with the genesis
of culture was not one sectarian doctrinal heading among others, as
it was for instance for Democritus, but was rather the central item
among the prior decisions, which are indispensable for any technique
of education, as to whether man is found in a 'crude' or a 'refined'
condition. For specialists in providing for and taking care of life, such
as present themselves successfully here for the first time in European
history - people who believe themselves capable of everything and
promise everything to everyone-the main thing must be to make it
plausible that man is a creature who is fundamentally left in the lurch
by nature. Man would have to wander blind and deaf and helpless
through the world if he could not be helped, without regard to the
possession of reliable truths, by inventive craft. The polis then logically
becomes the sum of the circumstances justifying such provision of
help. No one is permitted, in it, to impugn the justification of rhetoric
by laying claim, for himself, to the possession of truth.
Protagoras will have produced the model for all the later theories
of the origin of culture; even Democritus merely reverses the deductions
that could be drawn from this prior assumption, by making the naked
state of survival, at the beginning, into a criterion of what he regarded
as later superfluity. It also seems that Democritus invented the expres-
sion "the art of politics" (politike techne). Sophism had no affinity for
his critical application of the theory of the origin of culture, as it \vas
to be appropriated by writers from Lucretius to Rousseau. For Sophism,
culture is a necessity of nature itself
But how culture precipitates out, what specific forms it takes, what
ingredients it makes use of, and which it lets fall- these are not pre-
scribed in ad vance, but are open, to be determined by the processes
in which the skillful strength of the rhetorical logos, as opposed to its
weaker natural forms, decides everything.
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With that, we have before us the po~ential antagonism between

Sophism and all philosophy of the Platonic kind, which, with anamnesis
or innate concepts, excludes the idea that man is originally poor,
considering him to be in need of finding himself but not of exogenous
realization through the intervention of an educator who is superior to
him. After all, Sophism saw not only the audience of its rhetorical art
as a plastic creature but also, before that, the adept of its own exercises.
In both cases-directly in one, indirectly in the other-what Pro-
metheus was supposed to have done to man, early in history, was
merely repeated. Nothing could have been more natural than to reach
for this mythical key figure. It helped Sophism to acquire an anthro-
pological framework that put it, with its rhetorical technique, in the
righteous position of using the only means available in an emergency,
just as man's original condition had justified the Titan in deception
in sacrifice and in stealing fire.
Sophism is what seems to follow most precisely from this myth.
The reproach that in their instruction for political action the Sophists
had developed no conceptions of ends, but only an arsenal of means,
detours around the implication of their anthropology that man is
referred to means because he is not equipped with knowledge of ends
and, for existential reasons, cannot wait for such knowledge to be
found. Consequently their praxis is poresis. a Here, too, it is by no means
(any more than it is in any other case, with the Greeks) the god who
has, perhaps, taught men what they must know and must (for their
salvation) observe, regarding him. Prometheus is a key figure for an-
thropology, not for theology.
If the Sophists were thought to have conformed to Plato's formula
that they made the weaker logos into the stronger, then in doing so
they would have acted in an entirely Promethean manner. Prometheus
could not believe in the power of the truth, but only in that of a word
that he had ready and kept secret until it would have its most favorable
degree of effect. It is not an accident that the doubters who want to
deny Aeschylus the authorship of Prometheus Bound argue from its
supposed traces of Sophism, which would imply that the age that is
ascribed to it needs to be reduced. There is in fact a seamless transition
here, which would make a transposition seem possible if other criteria
were disregarded.
One of the perspectival illusions of our picture of history is that, in
the outcome of antiquity, we see the antithesis of Platonism and
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Chapter 2
Aristotelianism as the all-dominating exhaustion of the scope for fun-

darnental ideas about the world. In fact, for both of them their almost
exclusive success in overcoming two other tendencies became decisive:
in the one case, in overcoming Sophism, and in the other, atomism.
In contrast to this, the sharp differentiation between Plato and Aristotle
is an internal dissension in metaphysics, a case of the narcissism of
small differences. The cutting out of the two great figures of the end
of the fifth century B.C., Protagoras and Democritus, reburied the
access to the problem, which had scarcely been formulated or become
formulatable, of how man 'makes' himself and his history. The vic-
torious metaphysics prevailed by affirming, reassuringly, that there
remained nothing essential to be accomplished in the world. The
decisions had already been made in the realm of the Ideas or the
forms - in other words, by nature. .
And if man is the appearance of an Idea or the realization of a
form that is firmly established in the cosmos of the Ideas or of the
forms, the myth of Prometheus loses its importance or requires further,
radical correction. What supports and answers for the individual is
the whole, so that the idea of using cunning or force to surmount
opposition to man and to preserve him has ceased to fit anywhere.
In the reflected splendor of the Ideas, one can no longer even ask
whether man belongs in reality. In or after this metaphysics, the idea
that a creature that is present in the world could be worthless, that
it could be better for it not to exist, can no longer be conceived by
any god, and no Titan needs to refute it. [Greek] tragedy has become
fundamentally impossible when it cannot be better for anything or
anyone not to have existed or not to exist any longer.
Aristotle opposes those who assert, of man, that he is not well
constituted but the most deficient living creature, left naked and un-
protected by nature. Here he aims quite literally at what Plato had
put in Protagoras's mouth when he represented him as demonstrating,
with the aid of the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, the teachability
of all human abilities. One can gather from this art myth what was
meant to be made impossible by the ironical adulteration ofSophislTI's
attachment to Prometheus. For in the decisive point, the question of
the art of being a citizen, it contains a revocation of Sophism's picture
of Prometheus.
Perhaps Protagoras's twice-repeated reference to the fact that he
is already an old man and probably could tell the young people a
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Part III
story [that they have not heard before] is ~eant to help us understand
the interruption of his intention, in the course of the story, as a sort
of slackening of concentration: Something emerges that has escaped
professional regulation. This also easily explains why this one single
time in Plato's dialogues it is not Socrates who stands before the
mutually exclusive alternatives of logos and mythos. Nor does the
Sophist make the Socratic use of myth, letting it take the place of a
logos that cannot be furnished, but rather describes the two means
of expression as being, for him, interchangeable at will or deliverable
one after the other. In the end it emerges that, in fact, the wrong
person is not able to make proper use of the instrument of Socratic
thought-the master Sophist does not know what must be the purpose
of a myth, and stylizes it into the geniality of age: "Should I give you
a lecture or tell you a story?" This reflects on the young Socrates in
the dialogue: He does not yet have any idea how the relation between
myth and logos, in the limiting case of the extreme questions, will
develop into the center of his mode of thought. Here, at any rate, in
the portrait given in Plato's Protagoras, in his introductory conversation
with Hippocrates, Socrates emphasizes his youth and his consequent
inability to solve the great problems, and therefore also to set straight,
already, the relation between myth and logos, which Protagoras mis-
understands. It must not be forgotten that the introduction of the art
myth into philosophy is not the putting forward of an original claim,
but is rather an act of resigned acquiescence. It is Plato's subtlety that
makes Protagoras, despite his age, know nothing of this, and makes
his myth get out of control as a result.
The brothers Prometheus and Epimetheus are occupied with pro-
ducing living creatures out of earth and fire and what mixes with
them. The cleverer brother lets Epimetheus persuade him to leave to
him the furnishing of the creatures with the abilities necessary for
survival. When the day that is fixed for completing the work arrives,
the preoccupied Epimetheus has the bad luck to overlook man. Thus
man becomes the akosmeton genos ['disorderly' race], which has a double
meaning, referring both to his inadequate equipment and to the offense
against the quality of the world as a cosmos [an 'order']. Prometheus's
responsibility results from the fact that he left the decisive part of the
demiurgic work to his brother. In order at least to make survival (soteria)
possible for the naked and unprotected creature, he becomes a criminal,
by stealing techne [skill] from the gods: the skills of forging and weaving,
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Chapter 2
•
together with fire, which without much allegorical ceremony represents

the possession of logos. It is the general substitute for what had eluded
man when the animals were equipped.
Now the decisive thing is that this ex post facto reestablishment of
equality with all living creatures by means of a substitute endowment
is not sufficient even to keep the human beings in existence. They
live scattered over the earth and have no organized state, and one
must suppose that all the consequences arise from that, which Hobbes
"vas the first to connect with the status naturalis [natural state] as some-
thing contrary to reason. For Zeus had withheld from human beings
the part of knowledge necessary for self-preservation that would have
enabled them to be citizens of a community. While the other gods
allowed the other kinds of skill that were under their care to be stolen,
Zeus is set apart as the one who did not allow himself to be robbed,
the one for whom even this Titan is not a match. But that means that
Prometheus is an inadequate protector of mankind.
What the Sophist attests to in the myth is the precedence of the
art of being a polites [citizen] over all other survival arts. In doing so
he unintentionally denies to Sophism's mythical reference figure the
capacity to acquire this art for men and to convey it to them. It is
Zeus himself who, through his messenger, makes men a gift of two
new capacities, aidos and dike, honor and a sense of justice. They enable
people to live united in cities and states. Whereas the demiurgic abilities
had been stolen from the gods, the political ones are Zeus's gift. The
designation given to the gifts does not suggest that one could also
receive them through the teaching of the Sophists, instead of receiving
them as a divine donation. That the granting of the virtues of citizenship
is not merely a fine addition and supplement to what Prometheus
had stolen is already evident from the fact that, as something withheld
by Zeus, they occupy precisely the position of the bios [means of living]
that was hidden and withheld in Hesiod. That this reoccupation by
the narrator reached his listeners and was understood, in tum, by his
readers was something that the author of the dialogue could take for
granted.
Now, Protagoras discusses the point of the myth as though Zeus
had not granted the capacity for civic existence directly, but rather
had done so indirectly, by way of the teachability of the characteristics
of the polites. But he does not derive this inference from the myth
itself, but from the actual functioning of the polis: It would not be
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Part III
able to punish those who fail to obey t~e norm for citizens if it did
not proceed from the assumption that effort, practice, and instruction
make one able to fulfill the norm. If one who evades that norm is
subjected to censure, anger, and punishment, then it must be possible
to have expectations of him that include the premise of teachability.
Thus, together with the Sophist's offer to teach systematically what
is teachable, the hero of Sophism has also fallen into an ambiguous
light. He had undertaken too much with his campaign of robbery
against the gods and had underestimated Zeus, so that only Zeus's
generosity had satisfied the requirements of survival after all. Zeus
punished the Titan in the new and subtler manner of the god who
had grown old and wise, by exposing his dilettantish looseness in
humanioribus [in human matters]. Since Plato invents this myth for the
master Sophist just as he does his supposed secret Heraclitean doctrine,
he maliciously makes him narrate the proto-Sophist's debacle. Pro-
metheus's mistake no longer lies in the theft of fire, with which he
merely tries to make up for his brother's negligence, but rather in his
own neglect of what is unteachable, of the human need for aidos and
dike, which, expressed by the will and the power of Zeus, just cannot
be appropriated and passed on, like things. The point that they cannot
be stolen is expressed mythically by Zeus's being above the level of
having dealings with cunning and thievery.
So it is the height of philological nonsense to remove from the
composite construction that is put in Protagoras's mouth the elements
that could not possibly be derived from a Sophist's lecture. It is precisely
the art myth that makes it possible for someone to chatter away, in
his senile loquacity, and for the story unexpectedly to push toward a
consequence that. is entirely inconvenient for him and his cause. In
the end it is also an example of the kind of inevitability that Plato's
Socrates loves so much that what cannot be stolen cannot be bought
either. Consequently, when Protagoras, in the end, does not hesitate
to talk about money, he has already run afoul of his own myth. What
Zeus had bestowed was shielded against the negotiability that is pos-
sessed by things.
This sort of thing is not unique in Plato's works. In the Gorgias he
takes up a trait of Prometheus's that is already found in Aeschylus,
where the Titan protects human beings from staring, fascinated, at
their coming fate of death, by inspiring them instead with blind hopes.
That could fit into a description of the effects of Sophistical rhetoric,
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Chapter 2
as Plato likes to see it. But in the tragedy Prometheus had been praised
for being so helpful to mortals by freeing them from the spell of
fatefulness. Now, in the myth of the judgment of the dead, Prometheus
has to carry out this, too, not as an unauthorized benefaction running
counter to Zeus's sentence of death, but rather as a mandate of Zeus.
\
As such, it is- part of the Olympian change of dynasty: Zeus changes

the procedure established by Cronus for admission to the Islands of
the Blessed. It is supposed to be made just, by Prometheus's with-
drawing the prior knowledge of death from those who are alive, so
that they will not be able to falsify the true character of their souls.
A deception becomes, ironically, an aid to truthfulness; no one is
supposed to prepare his moral reality out of fear of death or speculation
about the beyond.
The reform of the judgment of the dead aims at undisguised realism.
It has the dead, stripped of their bodies, appear before similarly dis-
embodied judges. In the spirit of the new doctrine of souls, Zeus takes
care that all encasings and clothings by the body and of the body are
kept apart from the final result of life. Even as a functionary of Zeus,
Prometheus is still a master of deception when he helps to banish
death from the consciousness of the living so that it can become their
truth without reservation. It is Sophism in the service of a myth that
explicitly wants to be understood as logos. With the means belonging
to a past world of the gods, Prometheus has become an assistant in
the reform belonging to the new era. What he can furnish men with
as an aid in life, by shielding them from their frailty, has become
useful, by a higher deceptiveness, in exposing their moral reality. Being
deceived, they cannot conceal themselves.
Thus the taming of Zeus has been followed by the demotion of
Prometheus. The old conflict has changed into either the intrigues of
comedy or serviceability for Sophism. Allegorical interpretation \vill
provide additional uses. When the Stoics have to harmonize the highest
divinity with their central philosophical concept of providence, the
proximity of meaning between pronoia [providence} and Prometheus, as
"forethought," helps them to such an extent that the Titan finally,
long before Goethe, can become the son of Zeus. That idea is first
documented in John the Lydian Uoannes Lydus, b. 490} in the sixth
century A.D., and it is part of a process of the genealogical coordination
of concepts that have become allegorical that is equally characteristic
of both late antiquity and Christianity.
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It was also inevitable that Prometheus 'Y0und up between the fronts

in the evaluation of culture. He had been saddled with too many
accomplishments on behalf of men. In Aeschylus, fire is already men-
tioned only incidentally as one of the gifts he conveyed. The catalog
of the things he first established - from writing to astronomy, from
seafaring to the interpretation of dreams, from medicine to the apex
of all sophismata [clever contrivances], numbers-becomes correspond-
ingly longer. For Plato this was still too little, since Prometheus had
not been able to do anything for political affairs. In the line of follo\vers
of Socrates that began with Antisthenes, the overcoming of Sophism
combined with rejection of luxury to produce a negative image of
Prometheus. Hercules becomes the Cynics' mythical model, through
an allegorical interpretation of his deeds. If the liberation of Prometheus
is also one of these, then it can only represent his being loosed from
the embrace of Sophism, his recovery from the liver ailment of coveting
public honor, as Dio Chrysostom has Diogenes say. With a different
conception of man - that of his possible natural growth and original
capacity for happiness-'Socratism' and Cynicism (no differently from
Aristotle) opposed the assumption that man's original condition was
one of worthlessness and incapacity for existence. Diogenes of Sinope,
who in any case is supposed to have declared tragic delusionb to be
stupidity, says that Zeus was right to punish Prometheus for the theft
of fire. But his reason is not that Prometheus's action had brought
him into conflict with the god's mythical jealousy, but rather that his
gift to men caused their natural powers to grow slack. They did not
need fire because they were helpless; instead, because they received
it as a luxury, they became accustomed to the artificial helplessness
of culture. Prometheus was the author of their corruption, which is
how Rousseau will rediscover him. When Menander blames the creation
of women on him, above all, then this is also at bottom a polemic
against luxury and waste, whose origin the Greeks, since Hesiod,
ascribed to woman. It was just, so says the comedy, for Prometheus
to be punished by being assigned such a modest honor, in his cult,
as the torch race.
Nietzsche will not think of this sort of opposition to Prometheus by
Socratism when he sets up the antagonism between Socrates and
tragedy as a central one for the Greeks. Here his concept of the tragic
is derived for Aeschylus's Prometheia. Through the mask of the Titan
he hears the god Dionysus himself speak. Socratism, he says, destroys
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myth in its essence. Nietzsche has a concept of history as composed

of active agents: Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes are capable of
making Dionysus fall silent. Even the late recantation in the Bacchae
does not change this, because Euripides is only the dramatic mouthpiece
of Socrates. The latter, by declaring virtue to be knowledge, derived
man's whole potential from th~ conscious, if not theoretical, accom-
plishment of virtue. If Socrates, as Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy,
is a "turning point and vortex of so-called world history," then this
turning is directed against Prometheus and toward the 'bourgeois'
mode of consciousness. What was destroyed there, of course, is no
longer more than a background that shows through, even in its re-
alization in Aeschylus. For "myth never finds its adequate objectification
in the spoken word." In the poets of tragedy, too, it has always already
begun its decline; when their heroes speak, they do this, "as it were,
more superficially than they act."
What Nietzsche, thus, does not permit is work on myth as a great
and burdensome effort of the generations to put superior power into
their picture, to draw what is too large to themselves and down to
themselves, with the full right of one who thereby makes life possible
for himself. What appears to the admirer of tragic pessimism as phi-
1istine degeneration is this as the depletion- already built into myth,
and again and again propelling itself onward - of what stands even
further back than myth, as something itself unmythical, because im-
ageless and faceless, as well as wordless: the uncanny, the unfamiliar,
reality as absolutism.
Why does Nietzsche want the tragic pessimism of, at least, the
Prometheus story to be preserved? The answer is simple: because he
knows, in advance, the metaphysical consolation for it. It is art. Where
the need for consolation diminishes, where remedies of geniality and
comfort and finally of frivolous thoughtlessness become visible, art,
for Nietzsche, loses it functional position, which is associated with
irremediability. "The deus ex machina [has taken] the place of the meta-
physical consolation. "c Euripides's invention says everything about the
abyss that it conceals behind its mitigations. What Nietzsche was not
to see was the real tragic subject of Aeschylus'S Prometheus story:
man in his natural unworthiness to exist. It was precisely for this tragic
hero in the background that the deus ex machina had already existed,
before the mythical drama begins and without his coming on stage
as such: This was Prometheus himself, as the one who had made the
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impossible possible, who had preserved an9 justified life for the mortals.
The Cynics will go further than Nietzsche: They will blot out even this
deus ex machina of man's early history from the list of their witnesses
to the truth, as the origin of the great departure from the capacity
for suffering and a diversion from the realism of human self-assertion.
The Cynics' disdain [of Prometheus] is opposed only at a late date-
too late for all despisers of ancient culture and for the many kinds of
extractors from it-by the emperor Julian, shortly before the summer
solstice of A.D. 362, in his polemic Against the Uneducated Dogs,d written
from Constantinople. The Cynics had aroused the imperial wrath by
being pleased by the ascetic features of Christianity and discovering
that it agreed with them in despising culture. Sufficient cause for the
emperor to take a stand against this epidemic of satiety with the
achievements of a mode of life and to make himself, as the protector
of what had fallen into contempt from both sides, as strong as it was
still possible to do.
The same thing had happened to the Cynics' theory as has happened
to similar theories that result from taking offense at the difference
between theory and practice: They are meant to be a theory of practice
itself, something that is most impressively formulated as a theory
composed of the disdain for theory, which overlooks itself, in the
process, making itself invisible by means of the device of practicing
the negation of theory in general as the negation of other theories. This
is combined with the ritual of acting in accordance with rules in which
the transformation of the world is simulated as an event that has
already taken place. Plato's Socrates had shown how to do this by
making the philosopher an object of laughter for those around him;
the Cynic had intensified it by his effort, by despising the supposed
values [Werte] of those surrounding him, to force them to despise his
supposed worthlessness [Unwert]. It is the rhetorical way of furnishing
oneself with confirmation of one's being different, which one never
has complete confidence in, oneself Under the influence of Stoicism,
nature is played off against what is not nature, and culture's sensi-
tiveness to what is, at any rate, held against it as 'nature' is presented
as proof of its feebleness. The demonstration against Prometheus proves
one's realism regarding the human cause: Man can exist without the
Titan's fire, which itself is nothing but that blind hope that causes
people to overlook reality. What is admitted as reality, now, is only
what can scarcely or still barely be born. Here is one of the common
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1
2
attributes of Cynicism and monasticism. Monasticism's origins can be

regarded as a sort of simulation of the increasingly lacking opportunity
for martyrdom. When testimony to the reality of the cause on behalf
of which the limit of what is bearable is supposed to be touched can
no longer be furnished by the easy means of dying, then it should
still at least be furnished by scorning life. This paradigm of 'practical
realism' never dies out, because its rhetoric is unrivaled. Only the
rituals change.
This is the state of affairs at which the emperor's pamphlet is aimed.
The Cynics, he says, have become one philosophical sect among others,
by no means, indeed, the worst and most contemptible, but still a
dogmatic formation, which must allow itself to be included under the
criterion that applies to all of them. If disdain for philosophy has itself
become a piece of philosophy, the leap into naked reality by means
of mere negation would have failed. The ancient procedure, which
never becomes obsolete, is that someone who wants to be entirely
different is brought under a concept by the others and has to let it
be said of him that the culture that was the object of his exodus
pursues him inescapably as the pattern of his invertings and
.
overcomlngs.
At this point the name of Prometheus is mentioned, and one sees
immediately that he is recalled to mind, against people who despise
his benefactions, with all the philistine comfortableness that Nietzsche
sees as resulting from the Socratic heritage. Julian receives him as
part of his renewal of paganism with a refined and systematized pan-
theon and a central cult of the sun: Prometheus, he says, brought gifts
from the gods down from heaven to men. Nothing was allowed to
be stolen there any longer, nothing needed to be stolen any longer,
because late paganism was supposed to make it unthinkable that the
gods' benevolence could ever have withheld anything from men. The
fire from heaven, then, is the distribution of rational power and spirit
to them. Reason, here, is not only light but also warmth, which is so
quickly missed when it merely illuminates things. By representing the
providence that rules over mortals, the emperor writes, Prometheus
makes nature warm, as though artificially, with a warm exhalation,
and by that means gives all creatures their share in immaterial reason.
Homesickness for the lost cosmos, which makes the concept of pro-
vidence so attractive, becomes (in this interpretation) the consciousness
of possible coziness.
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This "logogony" [verbal battle] of Juli~n Apostatae not only makes

the enlivening warming of the whole of nature coincide with the
awakening of reason but also harmonizes myth and metaphysics, belief
in the gods and philosophy, so as to gather the deadly unraveling of
the late age together once more in a homogeneous world view based
on the spirit of the pagan tradition. After all, he says, it doesn't matter
a bit whether one regards philosophy as, as some believed it to be,
the art of arts and the science of sciences, or as the best of the possible
ways of becoming like the gods, or as obedience to the instruction of
the Delphic god to know onesel£ The unity of the origin, which stands
behind the foreground appearance that is the sectarian formations,
guarantees the inner unity of philosophy. Julian is the Romantic of
antiquity as it comes to its end; his great remedy for its maladies is
going back to the origins. There Prometheus stands.
He functions in the context of a defense of Diogenes of Sinope, not
so much against those who look down upon him as against epigones
and imitators. Such an appeal to the founder of a school, in order to
attack the school by pretending to defend it against its decline, is a
classical element of the rhetoric of the schools: to put the disciples in
the wrong in their alliance with the master. If Prometheus was not
supposed, as in the traditional outfitting of the myth, to have been
incapable of giving life and soul as well to the bodies of the creatures
he had fashioned, but instead had himself been the great establisher
of the unity of animated nature and the culture that both illuminates
and warms, then the great Diogenes could not possibly have played
off the one piece of this establishment against the other - nature against
culture. Julian finds his formula for the simplification of the world in
the image of Prometheus by crediting him with everything that myth's
separation of powers had broken up into a mesh of competences and
conflicts. He knew that for the Cynics the founder of culture had for
centuries counted as the protagonist of the corruption of mankind,
because he did not abandon them to unprotectedness and the coldest
clearheadedness, but on the contrary condemned them, with his fatal
gifts from heaven, to the feeblest helplessness. There also, to base an
argument on nature meant to regard everything as capable of enduring
and fit for life as that thing is given in nature, and to describe any
addition, even if it should be a product of natural talents, as a deviation
from the well-founded norm. That made the Cynics put Zeus in the
right, against Prometheus, and it forces Julian the Apostate to represent
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Prometheus without the reference person of his conflict. He is not the

one who steals fire; he is a functionary of the sun, the highest and
most beneficent divinity, whom he also calls the begetter of man.
When Julian advances this, it has been an anachronism for a long
time. The attempt, in-opposition to the Cynical, Neo-Platonic, Gnostic,
Christian, and ascetic depreciation of the cosmos, to make it appear
once again as a sum of man's desires, serves above all to convert such
hankering into organized state power. The attempt of Synesius of
Cyrene, at the beginning of the fifth century A.D., in his book On
Dreams, to restore to Prometheus those "blind hopes" that came to
the forefront in his tragedy and to make him into an allegory of the
consolations based on the future that were available from the inter-
pretation of dreams seems more in keeping with and more consistent
in its articulation of the spirit of the age.
The importance of hope in the world, Synesius says, is so great and
so salutary that according to the judgment of weighty authorities man
could not endure life if it were still placed, as it was at the beginning
of the world, immediately opposite only the threats that endanger it.
Prometheus had given men hope as a remedy that made them conceive
more confidence in the future than in the hostile present. Hopes had
such a power that one who was in chains, if he would only allow
himself to follow his spirit's longing, would already see himself liberated,
would take part in a campaign, become a leader and, immediately,
a captain and finally commander-in-chief, would gain victory, make
the thank offering, and, adorned with the laurels of victory, would
have the victory feast set before him, a feast having either the excellence
of the Sicilian or the sumptuousness of the Persian sequence of dishes,
whichever he preferred.
So Prometheus is the bringer of illusionary gifts, the ancestor of the
pleasure principle, the Titan of the cheerfulness even of the prisoner.
To that extent Synesius has attempted to stand firm against the de-
valuation and revaluation of the cosmos with a myth that, in those
of its beginnings that are within our knowlege, could not promote
trust in the nature of the ruling gods. The devaluation of the cosmos
is the devaluation of the present; it can only be born in imagined
retrospect from the future.
The volatilization of the mythical outline of the Prometheus story
is the volatilization of the services that the Titan was supposed to have
rendered to human beings, that is, of something that, \vhile it was
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indeed accompanied by blind hopes, wa~ not composed of them. The

"new Sophistic, "f which knew how to tum everything into oratorical
ornament and had no more need of anthropological than it had of
mythical justification-because art for the first time presented itself
as its only justification - could deal just as playfully with the ideal
figure from Protagoras's fictive myth as it did with everything else.
For it, the Prometheus who fashioned man became the emblem of
the wordmongers of the imperial age. They are - if indeed self-con-
sciousness was ever pushed to such a level before in relation to the
production of words-the forerunners of the 'genius' manners and
excesses of the Sturm und Drang period. Lucian has to or wants to
defend himself against the spiteful charge that he is a Prometheus
with mere words. g If one could assume that Goethe had read this
piece of Lucian's before his "Prometheus" grew up in his mind, the
transformation of Prometheus into the aesthetic creator of the world
would only have been a change in the value sign.
After all, there was, since 1745, Gottsched's version, and then the
four-volume translation of Lucian by J. H. Waser that was published
between 1769 and 1 773 in Zurich, for which Wieland had written an
advertisement in 1769. Wieland's own translation first begins to appear
in 1788. Goethe, as we know from his book inventory of 1788, owned
a French translation that was published in Cologne in 1670. By whatever
means the appropriation may have come about, "that splendid piece"
CiJtter H elden und Wieland [Gods, heroes, and Wieland], entirely in the
J
style and the spirit of Lucian, will appear in immediate proximity to

the Prometheus fragment, in 17 73. However much of the idea of [the
artist's] 'creativity' may also go back, as Walzel has shown,h to Shaf-
tesbury, and contribute to the Prometheus syndrome, the linkage be-
tween the image of the potter who makes men and the literary author
was established in Lucian, by his satirical resistance to the imputation
of this very identity - or may even have been invented to combat the
invented taunt that he was nothing but a wordmonger-Titan.
The mockers would not, after all, he says, have called him a Pro-
metheus on account of the trifling value of the material that the potter-
god, on the one hand, and the word monger , on the other hand, made
use of-like the Athenians, who had already jokingly called their
potters and stove-makers Prometheuses. The common factor would
lie more in the novelty of their productions: in the fact that Prometheus
himself had thought up human beings, whom he wanted to fashion
as a sort of especially clever and graceful animal. That is an aspect
that has not been emphasized up to this point-the superiority of
being inventor and maker in one. As a word monger, he says, originality
is not the value that he strives for as such and by itself; the novel
aspect of his invention, which was the combination of the philosophical
tradition of the dialogUe with elements of comedy, is only justified by
the fact that it pleases. "If I didn't think this, I should consider it right
to have sixteen vultures eviscerate me for not understanding how an
ugly thing is only made uglier by being novel."
It is true, he says, that the blending of dialogue and comedy would
allow one to execute a different comparison with Prometheus, since
the latter, "as is well known, was accused, as a major offense, of
having invented the means by which to make man and woman one."
Although the Prometheus story, in its connection to the myth of Pan-
dora, had a relation to sexuality since Hesiod, still the invention of
the combination of what is incompatible [Vereinigung des Unvereinbaren]
is a remarkable thing to attribute to Prometheus at this point. It would
ha ve had to be more natural to connect the writer also to the Titan's
other crime, the theft of fire. But Lucian does not use this for a positive
point of contact from which to go on to impute to himself the enlight-
enment of his readers, but only examines the reproach of theft. That
gives him an opportunity to emphasize what, despite all his protests,
he has at heart in the entire text: his originality. Whom is he supposed
to have robbed? He was not aware that anyone before him had already
"brought to light such prodigies."
If the word monger [Wortemacher] here resists being compared to the
man-maker [Menschenmacher], then it is because he insists upon his
standards. Of him at any rate, he says, it cannot be said that he seeks
only innovation, without recognizing his responsibility for quality. The
sideswipe is aimed at Prometheus's creation, not at its creator.
In one of the dialogues for which Lucian has to defend himself
against this reproach of being a Prometheus en logois [in words], he
puts personages of the tragedy together once again: Hephaestus (in
Gottsched's and Wieland's translations, Vulcan), Hermes (in the trans-
lations, Mercury), and Prometheus. i This dialogue has the features not
so much of a comedy as of a proceeding in court. Prometheus's self-
defense is not an end in itself; it is a critique of the gods' behavior in
matters relating to a patronage of man that is now presented as being
in the gods' own interests, or at least as not violating them. Titanism
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Part III
presents itself as theodicy; it is only through man that the world

became worthy of existence-in Gottsched's German: " ... die Erde
nicht mehr wUste, und ohne Schonheit, sondern mit Sdidten, gebauten
Ackern und Weinbergen ausgeziert, das Meer schiftbar ... die Insuln
bewohnt, iiberall Aldire, Opfer, Tempel und Feste ... und alle Strassen,
und aIle Markte der Menschen mit dem Jupiter erftillt ... " [. .. the
earth no longer barren and unbeautiful, but instead adorned with
cities, tilled lands, and vineyards, the sea navigable ... the islands
inhabited, everywhere altars, sacrifices, temples, and festivals ... and
all the streets and all the marketplaces of men filled with Jupiter. .. J.
Thus it is also with the theft of fire: After all, nothing is lacking
from the heavens' fire after the human beings have received some.
Here we have a new, disarming argument based on the nature of
fire: Someone else's fire is not reduced when one lights one's own at
it. In this case it would have been sheer jealousy toward men to
persecute the conveyor of fire. But gods were supposed to be exalted
above jealousy and, on the contrary, the bestowers of everything good.
Still more-and this is typical of his Sophistical apology-even if Pro-
metheus had stolen all the gods' fire, this would still signify nothing,
because they have no need of fire whatsoever, neither to warm them-
selves nor to cook their ambrosia nor to provide themselves with light.
And then the defender of the theft of fire forgets that he himself
had been the mythical perpetrator of the deceptive sacrifice: Human
beings, he says, need fire not only to eliminate their lack of warmth
and light and to cook with but also, not least of all, in order to present
the finest sacrifices to their gods. Prometheus had first put men in a
position to prepare this favorite pleasure for the gods. But here the
self-comprehension demonstrated by the example of Prometheus be-
comes aesthetic. What had suggested the deceptive sacrifice to Pro-
metheus had not been the protection of men's interests at all-what
had mattered to him was the trick, the joke, the foolery. The new
god, the upstart Jupiter, had been taken in, and had taken himself
too seriously to make anything but a tragedy out of the affair and
"to have such an ancient god as me crucified on account of a little
bone that he found in his portion." What a disproportion of means-
characteristic of the insecurity of newly established power- "to involve
the entire Caucasus," with chains and eagles, on account of a teasing.
This was just the kind of length to which an offended parvenu would
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go. What would he have done if he had been cheated of an entire

ox?
Here the mighty Sophist can point to his creatures, to men, and
recommend them to the god as an example; after all, they let their
occasionally nibbling cooks get away with perfectly comparable things.
There is the upside-down world again: Human beings behave more
sensibly than the gods. The god makes a piece of foolery into a tragedy
because he cannot forget that he is a god and is continually responsible
for proving it.
The scene is on the Caucasus, where the eagle that will feed on
Prometheus's liver is awaited. Zeus's two employee gods have to choose
a location for the enchaining that is high enough to prevent the human
beings from coming to the aid of their creator but not so distant that
they would lose sight of the crucified Titan. The emphasis on his being
the one who fashioned man, which epic and tragedy were as yet
unaware of, has created an intensity in the relationship, in relation to
which the conflict with Zeus is only background.
Since the author had to reckon with a culturally informed audience,
he must have intentionally included the full range of literary references.
When Hermes speaks of the deceptive sacrifice, he knows about it
from his Hesiod. That, Wieland notes in connection with his translation,
is a "comical anachronism, the likes of which Lucian often makes his
gods perpetrate, because in the mouths of beings that are, as it were,
constructed out of inconsistencies and contradictions, they have a pe-
culiar charm." The satire makes use of its distance in time from the
archaic: Even Mercury knows about all that only because he "learned
it, as it were, in school."
The same thing holds for the allusion to Plato's Apology, with its
Sophistical demand for reversal: Prometheus, like Socrates, demands
for himself more than acquittal- he demands to be fed at the public
expense in the Prytaneum. That is part of the model of declamation
that Zeus's emissaries are willing to hear from the proto-Sophist \vhile
waiting for the eagle. Its effect can only be that even these listeners,
who belong to the other party, are eager for the change that Pro-
metheus's prophecy of the arrival of Hercules announces, even before
the execution of the punishment has begun.
In antithesis to Epicurus, Lucian Inakes men the center of the gods'
interest. His Prometheus, the master of rhetoric, explains this by the
fact that otherwise they would have nothing to cOlnpete \vith. He
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formed creatures out of mud, he says, who were "similar in form to

us gods," precisely because he saw a deficiency in the divine nature,
"as long as there were not mortal beings as well, with which they
could compare themselves and thus perceive their own privileges that
much better." This inversion is the heart of the satire. The anthro-
pomorphic construction of the gods becomes the theomorphic con-
struction of men.
And now he was supposed to have failed in this undertaking because
there were misdeeds and adultery, war, incest, and patricide among
human beings, when, after all, these things happen every day among
the gods, and no one criticizes the begetters of the race of the gods,
Uranus and Gaea, on account of that. If the life of the gods, in Epi-
curus - also with an eye to what is ultimately possible for the wise
man-is supposed to be freedom from care, then the Prometheus
story, as seen by Lucian, epitomizes the production of care in the
gods. Prometheus, with his creatures, has taken something upon him-
self, and, by them, has also given the other gods troublesome business.
His defense is that a life of leisure between the worlds would militate
against everything that can save even gods from dreary boredom.
True, he has been punished for producing men, but at the same time
his fellow gods have not come up with anything better to do than to
become lovers of their wives, unceasingly going down to them and
doing them "the honor - sometimes as bulls, sometimes as satyrs or
swans-of begetting gods upon them." Myth appears as a compre-
hensive process of the entanglement of gods and men, and in the
rhetoric of this Prometheus, that is men's opportunity to pass from
their former worthlessness into a state in which their existence is
necessary for the gods themselves.
It is only a subtle way of e~pressing this entanglement- that is, it
is more than a rhetorical trick-when Lucian's Prometheus justifies
his human creatures by their being 'made in the image of' j gods.
Rhetorically, it is an argument that silences the accuser; it is subtle
because the justification of the image is made ambiguous by the def-
amation of the original. When Prometheus asks where he could have
found a better prototype than is presented by the most perfect of all
figures, then this also contains unassailability as a result of relativization.
One thinks of the best of all possible worlds-which the Stoics, after
all, already had-and the objection, which always suggests itself even
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if it is scarcely expressed, that in that case the actual world would

disprove the right of the best of all possible ones to exist.
The Greeks never perceived anthropomorphism as an expedient
employed by a faculty of imagination that is not a match for the
divine: They had thought that in giving their gods the idealized form
of human beings they were merely giving them what they owed them,
not what was satisfying to themselves. True, Burckhardt thinks that
Phidias's Zeus was produced in what was already the relatively un-
believing age when Anaxagoras was teaching-but the Greeks were
"relatively unbelieving" as far back as we can see. To assert that there
was a time when they were not so is the pure obligingness of philological
invention that seeks to bring them closer to the difficulties of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they grow unbelieving. On the
other hand, Burckhardt cannot quite bring himself to believ~ that
Lucian on his own ground would have had his Prometheus say that
he made living creatures who resemble the gods: "Could this possibly
be a Jewish influence in Lucian?" But it is only this device that makes
it possible to push frivolity to the point at which, in ridiculing the
gods, Lucian does not hurt them at all-did they still have need of
ridicule? - but rather, indirectly, their likenesses. For this satirical pur-
pose he makes the former [the gods] invent the latter [men] for them-
selves, as his Prometheus does. The mistake in Burckhardt's remark
is the assumption that Lucian reversed something (under the influence
of foreign texts) that the Greeks had only been conscious of as pro-
ceeding in the other direction: "The gods are ideal human beings,"
and the Greeks had made them as Phidias had made his Zeus.
On February 1, 1870 - almost two years, therefore, before the ap-
pearance of The Birth of Tragedy - Nietzsche said, in a lecture entitled
"Socrates and Tragedy," that the ruin of the genre "began with dia-
logue." The latter, he says, was Socratism, even older than Socrates.
Confirmation of this thesis can still be found in the last offshoot of
the combination of myth and dialogue: in Lucian's Dialogues of the Gods.
To present Zeus and Prometheus in dialogue, as the first of these does,
is something that tragedy would not have presumed to do; in tragedy,
the deus novus [new god] was present only through his underling. The
distance, there, between the ruler and the sufferer was exceedingly
great; otherwise this obstinacy of a god against a god would not have
been the epochal turning that reveals itself, at a distant point in time,
as the hidden weakness of the newly risen Zeus. The satirical dialogue
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Part III
dares to take the 'bourgeois' step of denying that tragic distance. The
configuration is more important than the content, with its intentionally
trifling insubstantiality. In the casual establishment of proximity, the
power-depleting effect of work on myth exhibits itself.
Nietzsche is perfectly right to say that where dialogue begins, matters
become bourgeois, because commerce is not far away. The actors
discuss their problems. Prometheus wants to be set free; he thinks he
has done sufficient penance. Zeus thinks, on the contrary, that for
such crimes as the creation of men and especially of women the
punishment has still come to far too little. But Prometheus does not
blackmail Zeus with his knowledge of the endangered state of his
dominion over the world. He merely makes him the counteroffer of
some important information in return for his release. He does not
want to get it simply "for nothing." To put it in the terms of Andre
Gide's late travesty of the myth, he does not want Zeus's acte gratuit
[gratuitous actionl. This god is not good enough even for mercy.
With the possible exception of the tenth dialogue, between Hermes
and Helios, this first one is the most 'pregnant' one in relation to the
work on myth that can be seen in the Dialogues of the Gods. It exhibits
a combination of eschatology and geniality that is as startling as it is
perplexing. This is a result of the dialogue situation, in which Zeus is
on the point of doing something that will be decisive for the continuation
of his regime, and Prometheus offers him a price for his release. Zeus
still feels the old mistrust; he is afraid of being outwitted once again.
Even Prometheus's gesture of humility, to the effect that he cannot
gain any advantage over Zeus by cunning because the Caucasus and
the chains would always be available, is not enough for Zeus. He
thinks in terms of guarantees, and wants to know in advance what.
Prometheus's offer concerns. Here Prometheus gives him a sample of
his knowledge: Zeus is on the way to make love to Thetis. That is
sufficient. It is not a prophecy that relates to the distant future and
suggests long-term preventive measures and precautions. Prometheus
expresses the urgency of his warning with the admonition that just
as Zeus had once come to power himself, so would the son of the
Nereid, whom he was on the way to beget, deal with him too. Zeus
does not even let him finish speaking; he understands the allusion to
the repetition compulsion in the replacements of one dynasty by
another.
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But everything points to the question, Why does the Titan save
Zeus from his fate when Zeus is on the very point of certainly falling
into the trap, which he has set himself, of his downfall? Because, after
all, the surrender of the secret would only be understandable if it
were the only way to avert another long period of punishment and
suffering. Not every question can be asked of the parody of myth,
any more than of myth itself. But it does become clear that Prometheus
does not want his triumph and, with it, the repeated rotation in the
filling of mythical positions. This element is an indication of the distance
from tragedy's way of constructing the myth: Like the dialogue itself,
the action that concludes it is a piece of urbanity. Even before he is
unchained, Prometheus is courteous enough to express the wish that
Zeus may continue to be spared what brought him to power.
Translator's Notes
a. Poiesis signifies "making," "creating," or "producing"-as opposed, for instance, to imitating

or perfecting, the primary modes of human praxis for Plato or Aristotle.
b. The delusion of tragic heroes.
c. A quotation from Nietzsche's notes on "Music and Tragedy" written in the spring of 1871,
in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920- ), vol. 3, p. 359. (Information supplied by the
author.)
d. "Dog" is one possible, and popular, etymological interpretation of of "Cynic."
e. Julian the Apostate, as the Christians called him.
f. The revived cultivation of rhetoric at Athens under Roman patronage, beginning in the first
century A.D.
g. The text of Lucian of Somasata (c. A.D. 11S-c. 200) that is discussed here is "Pros ton eiponta,
Prometheus ei en logois," or "Ad eum qui dixerat, 'Prometheus es in verbis' " [To one who
said 'You're a Prometheus in words']. It is also known as "The Literary Prometheus."
h. Oskar Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von ShaJi.esbury z.u Goethe, 2d ed. (Munich: Hueber, 1932).
i. This dialogue is usually entitled, simply, Prometheus.
j. Eben bildlichkeit , the term used in translating the Bible account of Creation. The scare quotes
arc lTIme.
3
Return from Existential
Groundlessness a
On ne marchait dans mon jeune temps que sur des metamorphoses.

-Voltaire, Le Taureau Blanc
[In my young days you could not go out of your door without stumbling
upon a metamorphosis.]
If one agrees, experimentally, with Nietzsche's thesis that the type of

self-appropriation through consciousness, concept, and dialogue that
was produced by Socrates already imported opposition to myth into
tragedy, then the other specific forms of 'mythology'b - allegorical
interpretation, genealogically organized collections, the currency of
rhetoric, handbooks-become ways of utilizing myth that converge in
their tendencies. In the language of the process that is typified in the
formula "from mythos to logos," it is, perhaps, the no longer sur-
passable subjugation by logos, when myth's principle of formation,
'conceptualized,' dominates the mode of work on myth. Logos exhibits
myth, not as its product, not as one of its authentic processes, but as
something that it has understood and categorized - as though the
museum already existed, that late phase of the successful presentation
of what the present preserves so as not to be it any longer, and in
relation to which it always enjoys this distance at the same time.
Mythology has become one of the provinces of logos, insofar as logos
has domesticated archaic reality in the dimension of time, too, and
administers it in the manner of an antiquarian.
In this process the suspicion is entirely excluded that the incor-
poration of myth into collections could be more than a matter of
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Chapter 3
making it surveyable and accessible. Nietzsche sees the Socratic type,

who was ready to take over, triumphing over archaic greatness. There
is not even a suspicion that the motive force of the process might
come 'from behind,' that it is also possible that the scarcely bearable
excess of the burden of being human in such a way that it would be
better not to be human might after all have been thrown off, sur-
mounted, endured. Is there not, very definitely, a greatness, which
was recognized at a late date, that, when it is embodied in a figure
like Tantalus or Ixion, makes the onlooker suspect the presence of a
will to throw it off not only by never having become it and been it
but also by being it no longer and being certain not to be it again?
In that case the propelling force would come from the nature [Ver-
Jassung] of the thrust that gave rise to myth itself. If Hesiod's Theogony
already presents this intentionality to us - that of gaining, from the
figure of the last of the gods, a calm certainty of his final power over
the former world-then the poem would be more than an ordering
achievement that also ranks as poetry; it would be a myth of myth
itself. So the possibility cannot be excluded that an encyclopedic 'work-
ing up' [of myth] that was guided by concepts rather than by genealogy
might accomplish no less, at its point in time, than a metamorphosis
of the world of metamorphoses - as well as, precisely in this form of
self-presentation, a literary preparation [of materials] for the future,
which is something that (differently from chronicles and annals and
from archives) simply cannot be intended or contrived. Ovid's M eta-
morphoses is a lucky chance, on the border between the discovery and
display of the principle of mythical plasticity and the blossoming of
an imagination and a delight in play that are unconstrained by the
derivation of their materials.
Precisely on account of its disposition over the mythical material,
as a world that was originally foreign to the Romans, the Metamorphoses
exhibits aesthetic distance from any 'urgency' of the experience that
is absorbed in the stories. From the lack of any original relationship
to myth, a miracle of interwoven reception and construction arose
that, along with Virgil's Aeneid, is the only work of antiquity, \vithin
the horizon of myth, that draws after it a continuous history of people
being affected and fascinated by it-a history such as we are inclined
to credit Homer with but are not in a position to dernonstrate. The
European imagination is a net.work of reference that centers, t.o a large
extent, on Ovid. Metamorphosis \vas the key \vord not only for the
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relationships of the gods, down to the most recent dynasty, but also
even for human history into the contemporary period of Caesar and
Augustus, as an expression of the capacity of even human 'substance'
for transformation. This connection, deriving and sanctioning Rome's
identity from a distant source, was also, and particularly, to give the
book accessibility for almost two millenniums, being comparable in
that respect, once again, only to Virgil's epic.
The poet counts on an audience to which the core mythical contents
are so familiar that it can effortlessly recognize and enjoy the adroitness
of additions and transitions, of deformations and associations. Not the
least evidence of this is the fact that the poet does not need to use
the name of the shaper of man. That circumstance paved the way
for the 'reoccupation' of his position in a tradition that for a long time
was shielded from Greek material.
When the Metamorphoses ends with the proud expression of con-
sciousness of its inviolability for all the ages - and at the same time
the expression of the congruence of this 'eternity' with the power of
Rome-then with the explicit challenge that even Jupiter's wrath will
not be able to destroy either of them, any more than fire, the sword,
or age, we get a last glimpse of the Titan, of whom this could have
been said.
The term metamorphoses is not a mere collective title for myths, but
designates the principle of the formation of myth itself, the fundamental
form of a still unreliable identity belonging to the gods who are pressing
their way out of formlessness into appearance. It exhibits unreliability,
to be sure, but only as the stigma of the heritage of that derivation
from chaos. Consequently for Ovid, as already for Hesiod, that be-
ginning itself is part of the story of stories, but here as the story of
the formation of the world itself. The beginning is neither demiurgic
nor imperative, but instead is the advance positing of metamorphosis
for everything to follow. "Before there were lands and the sea and
the sky that hangs over all, nature, in the whole world-circle, had only
one face: that of the rough formlessness that people call Chaos." It
is no longer the gaping "abyss" of Hesiod, but more nearly the hyle
['matter'] of the philosophers. This raw primeval mass (rudis indigestaque
m,oLis) has nothing abominable about it; it merely satisfies the secret
desire for a complete 'survey' of the story of the world from the
beginning to the present, by making "metamorphosis" into the nec-
essary mode of processes-rather than, say, "mixture," as in atomism.
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Chapter 3
It is not by accident that Chaos itself is already a face (unus naturae

vultus), before the profusion of all faces, already morphe [form] before
all the metamorphoses. Chaos does not 'explain' what comes after it.
It is merely an untenable state, because it consists of the conflict of
its parts, of the collision of incompatibles. The world process gets
under way because it puts an end to something that cannot endure.
The ideal does not draw the cosmos out of chaos, as in Plato's myth
of the demiurge; instead, formlessness is itself instability and inability
to endure, and has to do something to resolve its incompatibility. In
that way it, too, finally tends toward the "forms" of metaphysics, but
'from behind,' out of the desperation of the origin.
While the story does unfold the principle of metamorphosis, it could
not culminate in the solidity of the world ruled by Rome unless it
stabilized itself in the shape it finally arrived at. Already implied by
that is the fact that man, when he comes on the scene, exhibits, in
his shape, the stage of minimal susceptibility to metamorphosis. He
is not only the model of completeness but also that of finality, which
is expressed in the fact that Prometheus, who is only named as the
son of Iapetus, formed him after the image of the all-governing gods
(in eJfigiem moderantum cuncta deorum). Prometheus's metamorphosis of
earth into the likeness of the gods precedes all the metamorphoses
of the gods into the forms of particular human beings. If the emphasis
is not on the potter who makes men but on his most primitive material,
then this myth complies with the formula of the vvhole work; but to
add the transformed earth (tellus conversa) to the picture, the abstract
and faceless agency of the opifex rerum [maker of things] who made
all the other things in the world was not sufficient. This differentiation
seems not to be a major concern for the poet.
What matters to him is the derivation of the prototype and the
alignment of the copy; this is given by Prometheus's command that
Inan lift his face to the stars. The formula of this imperative has
become a standard quotation in the literature that follows Ovid [der
Rezeption1. It permitted both immanent admiration of the world and
transcendent surpassing of the world: "os homini sublime dedit, cael-
umque videre / iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus" [He gave Inan
an uplifted face and bade him look at the heavens and raise an upright
gaze to the stars]. So the introduction of the shaper of Inan alongside
the shaper of the world carries no disposition toward Gnosticisln. It
is explained best by- together with the emphasis on the special Inatcrial
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used by the potter - the difficulty that results from the assumption
that the likeness of the all-governing gods could only be realized by
a figure who was subordinate to them. The biblical Elohim's talk of
making man after his own image and likeness will have been an
entirely heterogeneous idea to the tradition that thought in terms of
a demiurge. ,
From the compositional point of view, the heterogeneous origin of
human beings is no doubt meant to prepare for, if not to point ahead
to, the fact that Jupiter will immediately make the decision to extirpate
them by means of the great flood. Only Deucalion, another Noah,
who in Greek mythology is the son of Prometheus and ancestor of
the Hellenes, will survive it. How he succeeds in this is instructive in
relation to the question of whether man forms a legitimate part of
nature. Zeus does not grant the just man his escape and instruct him
on how to manage it; on the contrary, the god is confronted with the
accomplished fact, and acknowledges it, by bringing the catastrophe
to an end. The humans, Deucalion and his female companion, survive,
but from a higher point of view this is a contingent event. Consequently
they can have no positive confidence in the continuation of their life,
either.
In this situation, which has not been made more reliable by any
assurance from the god, the vague figure of Prometheus emerges once
more, for Deucalion wishes, in a 'contrary-to-fact' subjunctive con-
struction, that at this moment he had the art by which Prometheus
was able to make men: "0 utinam possem populos reparare paternis
/ artibus ... " [Oh, would that by (my) father's arts I might restore the
peoples ... ].e If the name of "father" in Deucalion's mouth is not a
metaphor for their being descended from the products of the demiurge
but rather is to be taken literally, as in the Greek myth, then all the
Titan's ceramic creatures are lost in the great flood and only his
procreative descendants survive. Ovid has difficulties here because the
myth of the flood had divided the early history of the Greeks from
that of the barbarians. The Greeks were descended from Deucalion,
and thus from Prometheus, not from his creations. For the barbarians,
recourse was had to the fecundity of his mother, Themis, who could
awaken children for herself from stones, though their descendants,
then, did not stand in the most favorable light. Ovid does not relate
an older feature of the myth, which is handed down by Apollodorus:
Deucalion owes his timely preparations for the coming flood to a
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Chapter 3
warning that he had received while visiting his father at his place of
suffering in the Caucasus. Again it would be the Titan's protection
that this time enables his son and the daughter of Epimetheus, Pyrrha,
whom he married, to come through the flood that is decreed by the
wrath of Zeus.
Since these two were not supposed to become the progenitors of
the non-Greeks as well, the re-creation of mankind is ascribed to a
very ancient procedure: The oracle of Themis causes the survivors of
the flood to gather stones on the stream bank and throw them behind
them. From them, the men and women of the new mankind arise-
with the exception of the Hellenes, whom the myth allows to be
begotten in the 'proper' manner. It is clear that Ovid could not make
this differentiation into the point of the metamorphosis. True, he
makes Jupiter in the end give his blessing to the escape of the parent
couple of the Hellenes, but he passes over in silence the fact that
Jupiter merely has to accept the success of the protection-again a
demiurgic protection: the building of an ark-given them by Pro-
metheus in yet another piece of cunning, although this is made more
agreeable for him by a thank offering from the escapees.
Ovid does not allow himself to be embarrassed by the difficulties
of the multiple origin of mankind any more than the Christian tradition
does with the comparable difficulties of the two versions of the biblical
text, which led only at a late date to the construction of the "pre-
Adamites." Just as in Ovid there stood the lapidary half-verse "natus
homo est" [man was made], so the unity of the generative continuity
of mankind remained the most important presupposition of the Chris-
tian salvation story, from the old Adam to the new. Dante quotes
Ovid in the fragment of his Convivio, which he had written during his
exile from Florence between 1302 and 1321, with explicit reference
to the dogmatic quality of the singular: "Nato e l'uomo; (non disse gli
uomini)" ['Man was made'; (he did not say 'men')]. The purpose for
which he is using the quotation is a defense of nobility as a way in
which the teaching of virtue is proved in practice, rather than as an
innate quality of Inankind. Nobility cannot be an essential characteristic
of birth because otherwise, in the last analysis, the unity of mankind's
physical origin would have to be denied. Something that, therefore,
cannot have the original character of nature must present itself as
acquired, as a mode of accomplishment, as the gaining of virtue. Ovid
stands as a witness that the pagans, too, would have regarded the
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idea that mankind has more than one or~ginallineage as false. It was
only in such a way that one could at least have defended the idea
that nobility was one of these lineages. Dante was not satisfied any
longer with the anonymity of the mythical shaper of man, in Ovid.
He cites the name of Prometheus to establish that entirely decisive
singular number of his demiurgic work, and as the pagan equivalent
of the biblical God. This is only one of the most interesting uses of
the mythical name for purposes of argument, but by no means the
earliest instance in which the biblical Creator is compared to the pagan
potter.
Between the reception of the ancient world's metaphysical concepts
by early Christianity and that of its mythological system there is a
functional and temporal difference. The assimilation to philosophy
was necessary in order to make intelligible, for an audience that had
not been foreseen originally, a message that was scarcely plausible to
it, and to offer that message to that audience as the solution of its
problems, as the fulfillment of its expectations, indeed as a complement
to what had always belonged to reason or had already fallen to its
share much earlier by roundabout routes. But only in the fifth century
is the "compromise" struck of which Manfred Fuhrmann has spoken
in which it was agreed that ancient mythology would be tolerated
within particular poetic genres. In that way the Roman upper class
was deprived of the "conservative privilege" of cultivating, and thus
representing, the past in the materials of rhetoric and grammar.
But the unpunished use of the image world of this past was also a
sign of definitive triumph. Ancient culture was now brought along, in
what had been identified by the Christian polemics of the early period
as its most dangerous form- that of myth-as a captive in the trium-
phal procession. It even ceased to be obligatory to interpret it alle-
gorically, as concealing Christian truths. Such ostensive liberality was
the display of tolerance that goes with consolidated power. The con-
tinuation of the literary tradition gave notice of the accomplished
subjugation, which was bound to derive its luster precisely from the
dignity of what was subjugated. The toleration of mythology is initially
and above all a manifestation of the historical consciousness that, in
spite of the fury that had been directed at temples, images, and books,
one had not destroyed the ancient world. But alongside this function,
the materials of a sanctioned culture [and "education": Bildung] became,
again, capable of being liberated: materials of a surviving defiance,
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Chapter 3
of a late rebellion against subjugation. It is chiefly a latency, not of

content, but of function. Historiography's temporal displacement of
the 'Renaissance,' deeper and deeper into the Middle Ages, is a result
of this latency and is itself a piece of myth aimed at avoiding the
Middle Ages.
In the beginning is the assurance of the identity, not of Prometheus
and Adam, but of the Titan and the Creator. Any differentiation
between the origin of the world and that of man, any hint that man's
real aid might come from some other source than the author of the
world, would have had to bring with it the suspicion of involving the
Gnostic split between the Old Testament and the New Testament.
The mythical demiurge had not made the world into which he released
his human creatures, and he could not prevent them from falling
under foreign dominion and having to suffer the disfavor of the new
cosmocrator [ruler of the world]. To prevent such ambiguity, with its
disposition toward Gnosticism, from arising required the definiteness
of dogma. Since the beginning of the world, Tertullian explains, there
have been righteous people, impregnated with spirit, who have rec-
ognized and proclaimed the one God who created the universe and
formed man out of clay. This, Tertullian interjects, is the true Pro-
metheus ("hic enim est verus Prometheus").}
An affinity to Gnosticism should not be described, in the language
of the history of dogma, as a threat to the substance of Christianity
that comes from some place or other outside it. Gnosticism is, it is
true, the expression of a universal and great disappointment with the
cosmos-the systematic form of its revaluation-but it is also the
difficulty of Christianity's self-interpretation, a difficulty springing from
the heart of its own process of formation. If the name of Prometheus
was allowed to emerge in Christian allegorical interpretation and met-
aphor' it was only as a prototype of the one God in both functions,
as Creator of men and as their Savior. Consequently the equipping
of men with fire could not be separated from their creation. It is a
single act, and there is no question how and with what legitimacy the
fire from heaven came to man, because (according to Lactantius) it
identifies him as an anirrzal caeleste [celestial creature). To represent the
derivation of fire as a sort of theft of what belonged to heaven can
only be a distortion. The possession of fire is the argumentum irnmor-
talitatis lproof of immortality]. Its use has lost the quality of sheer
necessity in the face of a life-threatening world and has becoIl1c the
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pledge of the highest destiny: "vitae cOl).tinet rationem" [it contains

the plan (or purpose) of life].2 Fire is not primarily the element with
which food is prepared and metal is worked, but rather the substance
that points upward. What is at stake is not the possibility of abiding
and of self-preservation in the midst of hostile nature, but rather the
way out of this nature.
The poets become partakers of the old truth. Although they had
always dealt with it only imprecisely, they had nevertheless preserved
some of it. Thus they had preserved the process of the creation of
man from clay and his being equipped with fire, which they had only
supplemented by making up the name "Prometheus": "Res eos non
fefellit, sed nomen artificis" [They were not deceived as to the fact,
but only as to the name of the maker].3 Because those old poets lacked
access to Scripture, the content of truth that was accessible to them
gradually became distorted. 4 The Prometheus of the poets has all the
marks of such a debasing process, for if he had been a man, he would
not have needed to make men, but only to beget them, as his father
Iapetus had begotten him himself. But if he had been a god, it is
impossible that he should have had to suffer the punishment on the
Caucasus. 5
This "church father" [-Lactantius-] who is, for Hieronymus's taste,
all too cautious, if not undecided, in theology, does not hesitate to
cite, from his Ovid, precisely the three verses that define the Titan's
creature by the raising of his face to contemplate the stars, even if
the quotation does not cover with complete precision what had been
announced in the context: "ad contemplationem sui artificis erexit"
[he made him erect, to contemplate his Maker].6 This student of the
even more questionable Christian Amobius, and tutor, at Constantine's
court, of the prince, takes still another step in the Christianizing of
the Prometheus whom he sees through the eyes of Ovid, by extracting
from the demiurge's command that man raise his head the biblical
formula of "face to face": "Stimulated by his upright posture and his
uplifted face to contemplate the world, man looks God in the face
(confert cum deo vuLtum), and reason recognizes reason (rationem ratio
cognoscit)."7 The command that carries out the Creation is supposed
both to bind man to nature, as a creature who is provided for in it
and integrated into it, and to impel him to relinquish it and put it
behind him, to seek his destiny outside it. That is why fire, although
or precisely because it comes from heaven, cannot have been stolen
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Chapter 3
for man. All the other living creatures only know how to make use
of water and are excluded from the highest of the elements. The fire-
bringer, for his part, only complies with the Creation command to be
of service to a legitimate creature of the divine wilL
The difficulty that had already been created for Ovid by the myth
of Deucalion's flood as the story of the origin of the Hellenes alone
recurs for the Christian author at the turning from the third to the
fourth century A.D. He regards the biblical account of the Flood as a
fact that is generally admitted among his readers. The deluge occurs
as the divine revocation of the human culture that has arisen up to
that point. Only after the catastrophe does God commit himself, for
the survivors, to the pledge not to make that sort of thing happen
again. Now the event becomes an argument against Prometheus and
his ability to guarantee the human race a lasting indemnity against
the will of the highest of the gods. The reference to the great flood
is supposed to demonstrate that myth has not arrived at the separation
of powers and that it is better to rely on the guarantees of the one
new supreme power.
Why should this Prometheus have laboriously made his human
beings out of clay if in fact the sole person to have survived the doom
of the flood, on account of his just character, is supposed to have been
his son Deucalion, who was begotten in the most natural manner?8
Thus Lactantius turns the inconsistencies in Ovid against his God's
Titanic rival, with the conclusion: "Apparet ergo, falsum esse, quod
de opificio Promethei narrant" [It is clear, then, that what they say
of Prometheus's workmanship is false].
The Prometheus myth had been the negation of any suspicion that
the cosmos and man's position in it might be ready to disintegrate,
and for that very reason it had to bring to light the Christian author's
involvement in 'reoccupying' such a function. His contradiction makes
comprehensible for us, in retrospect, what assurances against the caprice
of old and new gods man's self-comprehension had received from
myth. The biblical God had committed himself, by self-restraint, to
his offers of the covenants, and in the process had excluded only
partial catastrophe, but not the catastrophe of the whole. Of course,
at the time of Lactantius people no longer spoke so expectantly or
the end of the world. A Prometheus \vho had not after all been able
to protect his creatures from the wrath of his enel11Y \vas no longer
a suitable ally for them. What is sUI11rnoned up against l11yth in the
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Part III
form of the Titan is competition for the. greatest patronage of man.

The Prometheus story was not supposed to be able to share that
position with the covenant God of the old or the new dispensation.
But what does one do with a story that cannot simply be denied
either? Myths cannot be lies, if only because they also have to serve
as evidence of the existence of remains of an old truth. That is why
Prometheus too is given a residue of authentic truth, which will be
revived again, in connection with the need for archetypes for aesthetics,
in the French Encyclopedia's article on Prometheus: He was not the
god who created man, but he was the originator of the art of sculpture,
of which his likenesses in clay and mud were the first instances. By
that means he was also to blame for the idolatry of pagan cults,
because his art had filled the temples with images of gods having
human forms. 9 Only a small confusion had crept into the myth: The
inventor of art had been elevated to the inventor of nature.
The capacity by means of which the image and likeness of his God
learned to make images of himself was a detestable and indecent art;
when Jupiter rose to the summit of power and sought to establish the
worship of himself, he needed a skillful helper in it. He found that
helper in Prometheus, who was able, in the service of the new regime,
to make credible the god who, for the first time, had human form:
"ita verisimiliter, ut novitas ac subtilitas artis miraculo esset" [exactly
like the real thing, so that the novelty and accuracy exist by a miraculous
kind of art]. 10 Thus there comes about, with an apologetic intention,
the early Christian transformation of the figure of the Titan into the
prototype of aesthetic consciousness. But it only produces the em-
barrassment of not being able to make Prometheus a pure fiction, so
that one can still use the "miracle" of his art to explain the origin of
the worship of images. In Platonic terms, the misunderstanding would
have consisted in crediting the artist, who after all could only "im~tate
nature," with the production of the original. But in that case the myth-
makers would have spoken, without knowing it, of someone else: of
the real author of the originals.
The origin of art is intensified and demonized. That has to explain
the success of polytheism: In the artists' likenesses there was more
than resernblance; there was the splendor ifulgor) that fascinated reason,
that seduced it by its beauty into forgetting true majesty and abandoning
itself to unreason. II The origin of errors, a century before Augustine,
is more nea rly the enticement of beauty than the great transgression.
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Chapter 3
Only when man's freedom has to take responsibility for all that is bad
in the world can the Titan who invented images be forgotten.
The Renaissance brings a new and surprising equation, that of
Prometheus and Adam. It is the first, and cautious, approach to the
shift of consciousness to ascribing to itself, without reservation, man's
becoming himself. Here the equation might be founded, as it is finally
by Giordano Bruno, directly on the fact that both Adam and Pro-
metheus are defined by their relation to something forbidden: in the
one case, to the fruit that is the knowledge of good and evil, and in
the other to the forbidden fire that ignites reason. 12 In the equation,
what is forbidden is defined not as something that is not suitable to
human nature but as something that is withheld from it, so that while
that nature does lose the paradise of innocence, it gains that of knowl-
edge. In order to approach reserved goods, the deprivation of which
had become historically intolerable, the desperation of self-preservation
was not enough; cunning and deviousness were called for - a prelude
to the spirit of the science that could not accept anything as a gift.
The equation of Prometheus and Adam was more impressive as an
image than it was durable. The biblical Paradise had depended upon
a privilege that only man himself could reject and leave behind him.
Bacon's program for the modem age was also to be based on the
premise that regaining Paradise was a possibility that was open to
man himself. Expelled from Paradise, he had reduced his situation to
the conditions of a survival that was left up to him alone. The Pro-
metheus of the old myth creates man, without being able to secure
for him the favor of the new god or even of nature-a creature of
pitiable helplessness and stupidity. Prometheus has to apply cunning
and violence merely to produce the conditions of naked existence for
his creatures, including the conditions of the work they do to preserve
their existence. Reason does not lie in the fact that they possess fire
but rather in the fact that they are able to produce it themselves: the
irrevocableness of the Titan's gift, which is characteristic of the gifts
of reason. It alone cannot be forced to give itself up. If Prometheus
\vas projected onto Adam, that could only mean that the loss of
Paradise was supposed to be seen as a felix culpa lfortunate fault]: as
Inan's opportunity to be himself on his own account, irrespective of
what had brought him to that point.
In the course of Humanism's preparation for the Renaissance, Boc-
caccio at first took over Tertullian's equation of the delniurge \vith
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God the Creator. But man as he comes from the hand of the Creator
or of nature-of that first Prometheus, in other words-is still crude
and unformed, and needs a second Prometheus, who takes up this
initial state as his material and, so to speak, again creates men from
it ("quasi de novo creat"). Thus he produces the civil being from the
natural being. 13 Between these two poles, that of the homo naturalis
[natural man] and that of the horrio civilis [civil man], the accent can
shift. Over the long term it is displaced in such a way as to allow an
overwhelming share to go to formative work applied to the natural
substratum, work that man performs on man. Of the two versions of
Prometheus that Boccaccio had offered, that of the "second Prome-
theus" is left in command in the end-the old figure of the bringer
of culture, who takes responsibility for the man who withdraws from
his state of nature and forms himself historically. The most important
step, in this connection, is the denial that what Prometheus does is
punishable; and that is no longer so difficult because the Titan in the
Caucasus can, at least, no longer have been banished by a god \vho
is jealous of man.
The doubling of the allegorical Prometheus produces no dualistic
difficulties or dynastic rivalries, although in Boccaccio's text the con-
nection with Ovid's second creation of man, by Deucalion, is clearly
evident: The laboriousness of the new formation of man is represented
by the image of picking up stones. What dissolves the inner tension
of the duplication is the fact that the formation is justified on the basis
of nature, rather than against nature. The God who had created this
nature in such a crude and preliminary form wanted, precisely by
doing so, to hand it over to itself, to an inner formative process of
history, which was a process that was no longer subject to the mythical
jealousy of the gods. The second Prometheus is the figure of the wise
man, originating in the midst of men, who does not need to expect
any rivalry or even mere disapproval from the first Prometheus.
The enhancement and exaggeration of the image of man that be-
come possible in the Renaissance are protected by the principle of
the nature that is turned over to itself, that draws on its original
teleology. That is what differentiates all mythologicald renewal of myth
decisively from its sources. We may call up the archaic frame of mind
once again, in Burckhardt's words: "That the gods were jealous was
a strong and widely held belief, "vhich pervades all of myth and, in
historical times, is perfectly public, alongside all religiosity .... Any
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earthly happiness, any eminent quality is, as it were, an encroachment

on the gods' privilege of happiness and their perfection, and the person
in question is generally blamed for having wanted to 'defy' the gods,
or at least for having prided himself unbecomingly."14 That had become
impossible, and the martyrdom of the Titan on the Caucasus had
become incomprehensible - and also inadmissible, as a 'passion,' in
view of Golgotha. The "image of the chained Titan on the rock" had
been, again following Burckhardt, "familiar to all the Greeks," and
had impressed upon them "what position one was really in with respect
to the gods"-impressively enough "to keep alive, deep in people's
hearts, a mood of rebellious complaint against the gods and against
r t e. "15
la
This image was much more difficult to rehabilitate and explain, in
the approach to the modem age, than the image of the maker of
men, who could so easily be divided between God the Creator and
Humanism's embodiment of the process of the acquisition of culture.
The result was that allegorical interpretation had to accomplish the
most violent deformation in the case of the Titan on the Caucasus.
Not only because, according to Boccaccio, he was free of guilt, but
above all because he was not permitted to become a savior of man;
he was set free for the elevated forms of culture that are remote from
the issue of self-preservation. They now had to disengage themselves
from the Middle Ages, and could attach themselves to a justifying
figure like Prometheus.
So we are told that it was a misunderstanding and an invention of
the ignorant when the chaining on the summit of the mountain range
was seen as a punishment from the gods. According to Boccaccio,
Prometheus retired into the solitude of the mountains in order to
search into the secrets of nature. Even the eagle is an allegory of the
comparatively harmless affliction of insights coming from a higher
source. This rewriting of the story gave currency to the dissociation
of greatness fi-om defiance and relieved the new things that were
pressing forward of the appearance of Titanism.
Myth, in the Renaissance, never became a subject of concerTI for
dogma; it produced no rebellious oversize figurations of secession from
the Middle Ages, but instead, as it were, clothed its \vork against the
Middle Ages in their inherited and accredited lneans. Precisely if one
thinks that the title "the Renaissance" signifies the revolt that the
modern age, looking back at its beginnings, \vould like to see itself
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as, Nietzsche's view of the Prometheus s.tory becomes a remarkably

trenchant rediscovery. To him, the biblical story of the Fall, as a passive
stulnbling into a temptation, will seem harmless in comparison to the
active sacrilege perpetrated by the Titan when he freely steps forth
to compare himself to the gods. The antithesis is forcible, but the way
is prepared for it by the leveling off that the modem age itself had
executed on the figure of Prometheus.
This half-millennium that lies between Boccaccio and Nietzsche and
that once again displays every surprise in the transformation of the
Prometheus figure, every combination of its story and its characteristics,
also demonstrates in a unique manner the constancy of the thread
running through all of these phenomena, without which they could
not even be understood as the effect of deforming forces.
Shortly before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Florentine
renewer of Plotinus, Marsilio Ficino, casts a melancholy glance at the
mythical sufferer in the Caucasus. But again it is not defiance of divinity
or suffering on behalf of men that presents itself to him, but rather
the fire of reason that strikes back, destructively, at its transmitter. In
the middle of a didactic letter entitled, "Five Questions about the
Mind," the image of Prometheus suddenly appears. In its interweaving
of Platonic and Aristotelian elements, this theory of knowledge follows
the example set by Plotinus. That which defines the unity of all acts
of the mind is oriented toward the Aristotelian concept of movement:
Processes are determined by their goal, their completion, the state of
rest. Consequently the concept of the nature of the mind is directed
toward maturity, full development, completion: What the world as a
whole is capable of, namely, to integrate itself, in the unity of its
movement, as the "universe," cannot be denied to the human spirit,
but must not be missed by it either. It is a metaphysics that warns
against the unrest (which is about to make its historical entrance) of
the endless movement of cognition-against the historical form of the
infinite will and the interminability of man's self-realization. 16 It is
simply not the case that with the Renaissance and its concept of nature,
infinity breaks into consciousness like an epiphany. There would already
be sufficient reason for this not being the case in the fact that the
concept of form, together with that of the renewal of form (reformatio),
is the concept that governs everything, even if the concept of form
no longer has the old sanction of being pre-given, but admits the
theme of discovering form and self-formation. Precisely if the warning
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against reason's tendency toward interminability was to be taken se-

riously, nothing more senseless could have been represented to the
people at the time than the idea that man, who on account of reason
was the most perfect of the living creatures under heaven in regard
to the vocation conferred on him, should, as a result of that same
reason, remain the most unfinished of all. But that circumstance-
this turning of reason against itself, of its infinitude against its per-
fectibility - seemed to have been confirmed by the unhappy example
of Prometheus.
Why and by what is Prometheus tortured? The heavenly fire that
he had acquired with Athena's help also drove him to the highest
summit of the mountains, because this signifies nothing but the elevated
position of pure theory. There it condemned him to the fetters that
make him the victim of the greediest of birds of prey, the tormenting
craving for knowledge. But this Prometheus, too, has his eschatology.
He stands for what is only the preliminary boundlessness even of his
kind of theory: When he returns to the place where he received this
fire, he will find peace. As he is consumed by a single ray of the
higher light, because it only kindles his longing for the whole, so he
will then be penetrated through and through by the fullness of the
light. The Neo-Platonic drama of Being finds its manifest form in
Prometheus. Whereas he took the fire of reason to himself wrongly,
he will enjoy it, after the detour of catharsis through his suffering
from the scantiness of the portion that was separated off, in the fullness
of legitimate possession. It is the basic pattern of all N eo-Platonic
stories about Being. Added to it is a surplus that was as yet unknown
to Neo-Platonism, a surplus that prevents the path down and back
from being wasted: The reestablishment of the initial state \",ill be
richer and more secure than what had been there in the beginning
without any turning away, and what would have remained, without
it. Prometheus alters the condition of the world by his story.
In Ficino's allegorical interpretation, how and by what right human
beings came into possession of the heavenly fire is almost immaterial;
Athena's advice is not given any moral characterization. What, ho\vever,
is very obvious empirically, that one does not need to steal fire in
order, nevertheless, to have a share in it and to pass it on, is once
again overlooked and is turned practically upside down: Prometheus
had only been able to take and to pass on sorne if the heavenly fire,
not the heavenly fire. It is true that Athena, the goddess of science,
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had drawn on the divine wisdom, but precisely in doing so she had
split up [into multiplicity] something that could remain wisdom only
in its unity and that, as multiplicity and divided among many, had to
take on the pressing form of seeking and of painful inquiry. Prometheus
suffers the fortunes of reason, of its great detour and wandering through
the world.
The remembrance of these wanderings is the precondition of the
new final state's not being threatened or endangered by self-forget-
fulness. If this had not occurred and did not occur beforehand, then
it could still occur- that is the amalgamation of the fundamental
mythical structure with the outline of a metaphysics of history. That
is also why Athena's advice is just as fateful as it is necessary: What
that advice ordains, or could not at any rate allow the advisee to
escape, is history itself. Reason must withstand the entanglement into
which it is drawn by the infinitude of its claim and to whose torment
of restlessness it is consigned. The peculiar character of this idea will
find its exact representation in Kant's dialectic of pure reason.C' It is
the reason that first must deprive itself of itself, in order to arrive at
itself. There was no need of any external seduction, any sacrilege,
any Fall, but only of this yieldingness of reason to its own compulsions.
Ficino now also knows, again, the art myth in Plato's Protagoras,
which had been withheld from the Middle Ages. He puts in Prome-
theus's mouth what the biblical God said before the Flood, that he is
sorry that he made man: "Paenitet me fecisse hominem." What Pro-
metheus suffers from on the Caucasus is not pure theory but pity for
men. They have become unhappy, not as a retaliation for what he
gave them, but on account of the gift itself. Here Ficino's allegorical
interpretation has to be directed at the skills, both the liberal and the
mechanical arts, which derive from those belonging to Minerva, Vulcan,
Mars, and the inferior divinities [daemones "demons "]. Prometheus
himself is one of these inferior divinities who participated in the creation
and who represent the way it is exposed to danger when their services
and accomplishments are set up as independent [of the totality]. 17
Multiplicity as the destruction of unity-here, again, is the Neo-
Platonic schema. It is not enough to describe a gift as divine and not
to characterize its origin as theft; rather, everything depends on its
integration into the unity of the universe. Prometheus was able to give
to men the gift of speech-represented by fire-without stealing it;
nevertheless, it does not contain the civic virtues that are indispensable
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for man's welfare. Disposition over them had belonged, as in Plato's

account, exclusively to Jupiter, who had been beyond the reach of
Prometheus. Consequently the arts and sciences lack a relation to the
whole. 18 Against the background of Ficino's revival of Plotinus, that
means that the reason that is split up among individuals is not able
to reestablish unity under the conditions of the world.
One can describe Prometheus's 'mistake,' then, as his having wanted
to divide among many what, by its nature, could not be divided. There
is no plural of reason. He does not suffer for men or instead of men,
or for the consolidation of their culture against an alien will; instead,
he consciously endures the lack that cannot become clear to those
affected by it as nonidentity with reason. He endures the history of
what, by its nature, cannot have a history: the One, the Nous [Mind],
the World Soul. He endures-if one wants to reduce it to the briefest
formula-what it means not to be the absolute, to be a man and not
God.
If, in order to measure the distance, one compares Ficino's allegorical
interpretations of the Prometheus material with that of his master,
Plotinus, then one is struck by the fact that no Hercules is mentioned
any longer, to set the chained Prometheus free. 19 In Plotinus, Pro-
metheus had been the world soul, which manifests itself not only in
nature as a whole but also in man, though in the process it falls into
the company of matter. The origin of the world and of man is identical
with the one primeval soul's turning away from spirit. To that extent
Epimetheus is the preferred figure [of the two]; when he-contrary
to all mythology - refuses to accept the gift of Pandora, who (as Plotinus
arranges things) is a work of Prometheus's and is merely fitted out in
supplementary respects by other gods, he decides in favor of a life in
the spiritual world as the better one. Prometheus himself is enchained
by his product, and indeed so inextricably that it seems quite logical
when Plotinus brings in Prometheus's great rival among the mythical
liberators, Hercules. If we read the passage correctly, though, Plotinus
wanted to assert that Prometheus's being set free by Hercules meant
that Prometheus himself possessed the power to get free of the chains. 20
To be sure, Plotinus had appended to this interpretation the staterncnt
that anyone could adopt it if he wished. Of course, Ficino, who had
translated it in this \vay, first had to connect this self-liberation to his
fundamental idea of rDan' s self-formation.
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Almost simultaneously with this conception of the fate of reason in

the world, a different allegorical interpretation of the Prometheus story
comes into being, one that, according to a letter written by Erasmus
of Rotterdam to John Sixtin in November 1499 from Oxford, had
been part of the content of a disputation between John Colet, some
theologians, and Erasmus himself. 21 It almost goes without saying that
what is at issue here is the 'reoccupatjon' of biblical functions, whereby
the son of the first human couple, Cain, stands - without any corre-
sponding name from ancient mythology being named-in the light
of a 'significance' [Bedeutsamkeit] such as could only be awakened and
kept alive by the reception and transformation of the Prometheus
myth.
It is not the Creator of the world, nor the father of the race, Adam,
but rather the Cain who was rejected along with his offering of his
"fruit of the ground" who has become the key figure of human history.
The driving force of this story thus turns out to be an archaic dissat-
isfaction. The pugna acerrima [bitter dispute] among the contending
scholars breaks out when Colet asserts that Cain offended God by
placing more trust, as a tiller of the soil, in his own diligence as a
cultivator than in the kindness of the Creator of nature. Abel, on the
contrary, had rested content with what grew of its own accord (sponte
nascentibus contentus), which his sheep could graze on.
Colet's argument contains one of the fundamental conflicts of the
human attitude to the world. One has to realize that Abel, according
to this interpretation, still behaves as though he were situated in Par-
adise, and were not the offspring of parents who have been driven
out of it, while Cain does exactly what would have had to follow
obviously from this fate of exile, and what accords with the curse that
went with it: He places his trust only in toil and in the sweat of his
face. But submission with regard to the exile at the same time provided
an occasion for pride in one's success under the most adverse conditions.
The dilemma of all culture criticism seems to present itself already in
the earliest biblical scene (a scene that leads to fratricide) of mankind:
whether one can live in the world with the imputation that it is still
a little bit, or somewhat more, Paradise, or whether one can only
survive in it if one regards it as the aggregate of the negations of
Paradise. To that extent, this disputation belongs at the beginning of
the epoch whose pathos seemed for the first time to have taken the
expulsion from Paradise completely seriously, not so as to acquiesce
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in it but, on the contrary, so as to devote all its powers to regaining

Paradise.
When the dispute that Erasmus is reporting threatens to become
all too forcible and sharp, he offers his contribution, in the role of a
poet, to smoothing over the dissension and brightening up the meal.
What he has to offer consists in the pretense of a myth, which, however,
following Plato's example, his listeners must promise to regard merely
as such (pro fabula). From an old codex of unknown origin he derives
a "story that is very like truth" (veri simillimam narrationem). Cain, he
says, in spite of his diligence, always had to suffer from hunger and
avidity; but then he remembered the "tradition" according to which
his parents had been driven out of a garden in which everything
necessary for their support had grown of its own accord and most
abundantly. Nothing draws his attention to the justice of the punishment
that struck those who were expelled, and everything draws it to the
prospect of reestablishing what had once been possible for nature in
that case.
Erasmus disarms the story by ascribing it to an ancient, tattered
codex. In reality he is telling the single variant of the biblical story
that registers what is drawing near [in history]. What Cain had to do
was simply to supplement his proven diligence with an evasion of the
verdict. "Dolum addidit industriae" [He used craft to eke out his
industry]. With artful cunning (veteratoriis technis) he approaches the
angel who guards the locked-up Paradise and tries to bribe him into
secretly delivering up a couple of seeds from the prolific sowing of
Paradise. What Erasmus makes Cain demonstrate in his art myth is
the power of rhetoric. God, so he makes Cain say, has long since
forgotten the old story and ceased to have any interest in it. Of course
it is not a question of those forbidden fruits that had brought Adam
to his fall. But still more, an excessive zeal on the part of his doorkeeper
of Paradise might even be displeasing to God. Clever industry, on
man's part, could be more satisfactory to him than dull idleness.
Perhaps this God wants to be tricked? "Quid si falli etiam cupit ... ?"
The analogy to Prometheus's theft of fire is palpable. Cain attends
to Prometheus's business himself; he does not need the assistance of
a god or a goddess, because he possesses the power of speech. The
latter is capable even of making the locked gate of Paradise permeable.
It makes the doorkeeper-angel into an accomplice of the one \vho is
expelled, and brings the one who shuts out into the position of having
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something in common, in relation to the good that is withheld, with

the one who is shut out: To keep guard over Paradise is even worse,
Cain says, than to be deprived of it; the post does not even leave one
the freedom to roam about. The presupposition of this rhetoric is that
the God who is distant from the scene is the deus absconditus [hidden
Godl of the late Middle Ages. He is suspected not only of being hidden
but also of not being interested in human affairs, insofar as they do
not affect salvation, in the next world, which has become abstract. As
a result, secrecy in relation to the Omniscient is nevertheless possible,
like every kind of human skill in dealing with nature - even violently-
for one's own benefit. But the beginning of every opportunity is having
the power of the word at one's disposal.
Even in its most artificial late form, myth still presupposes that the
power of the gods is depleted, if only because of an assumed lack of
interest in the world resulting from the fact that questions of salvation,
in the 'beyond,' are regulated by faith. It is the myth not only of a
hidden God but of a God who looks in the other direction. Cain's
rhetoric blossoms because God is not thought of as paying attention
to it. He unfolds before the watchman-angel a panorama of alluring
this-wordliness, the visionary program of an epoch that has scarcely
dawned. He interchanges roles: It is, he says, an obsolete lot (if he
had known the word, he could have called it a medieval lot) to belong
in the ranks of the theological functionaries, to have an office like that
of watching over Paradise. "And let me tell you, this country of ours,
with which we console our exile, has woods with fairest foliage, a
thousand kinds of trees for which we have scarce invented names,
springs which issue in all directions from the hills and rocks, rivers
with limpid waters which glide on by grassy banks, mountains that
rise into the sky, shady valleys, seas full of wealth. " f He has no doubt,
he says, that in the innermost bowels of the earth rich rewards a wait
him who will dig them out and probe all her veins. Many things grow
of their own accord even here, outside Paradise: golden apples, luscious
figs and fruits of all kinds. One would not miss Paradise so very much
at all if one were only permitted to live here eternally ("si liceat hic
aeternum vivere"). Here the idea is immediately comforting that what
the individual can no longer take from the treasures of the earth on
account of the shortness of his life will be taken by his grandchildren.
It is true, he says, that men are afflicted with sicknesses, but their
diligence will find remedies even for them. He sees plants, he enthuses
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to the angel, that have marvelous fragrances-what if there were one

among them that could render life immortal? Regarding the forbidden
knowledge of that fruit of Paradise, he does not understand what
importance it is thought to have. Why should he trouble himself with
what does not concern him: "Quid mihi cum his quae nihil ad me
attinet?" He will not fall back one step as long as there is nothing
that persevering industry cannot attain ("non cessabo, quando nihil
est quod non expugnet pertinax industria"). Thus, he says, the nar-
rowness of a little garden has been exchanged for a wide world.
The quality of the rhetoric does not depend on the moral quality
[of the cause]. That is not a matter of course, since according to the
anti-Sophistical tradition, the art of saying things correctly was supposed
to gain acceptance for reality and its goodness. But here, in Erasmus's
art myth, it is the worst man who makes the angel an accomplice in
the worst cause, and, in fact, solely by virtue of the fact that he
possesses the best rhetoric: "Persuasit pessimam causam vir pessimus,
orator optimus." Cain is able to bring the angel, even though he has
a share in heavenly bliss, to consciousness of a misfortune he has that
has hitherto been hidden from him. He is bound to a task, Cain says,
for which men already use their dogs, and he has to stand outside
Paradise but is not allowed to take any part in the world. He appeals
to their equality in hopelessness: "Miser fave miseris, exclusus exclusis,
damnatis damnatior" [You who are wretched, excluded, and proscribed,
take the part of those who are in the same situation].
This Prometheus under the name of Cain who emerges from Eras-
mus's ceramic workshop is a man of the great word even more than
of great industry. With the vision of a world to come, articulated at
the beginning of the sixteenth century as a display of pure rhetoric,
he overcomes the fidelity of an angel, on behalf of man. He receives
what recollection made him desire and makes the earth produce such
a rich yield that even the forgetful God who looks the other way
cannot fail to notice how rich labor et sudor [labor and sweat] have
made the thief God overwhelms him with pests and weeds, storms,
and other disasters. He changes the watchman-angel into what he
had been brought into temptation by wanting to be: a man. Then
Cain decides to make a burnt offering with a part of his harvest. The
failure of this move is described in the Bible.
Thus the first attempt at a 'modem age,' projected onto the beginning
of mankind, ends in failure and despair; and it \vas intended, by
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Erasmus, as a myth of futility. The identification of Cain with Pro-

metheus is meant to bring the exploit of recovering Paradise into
scandalous ill repute. But it touches on a mental project that had yet
to unfold its attraction.
The word, as used by Cain/Prometheus, is rhetoric; it has nothing
to do with magic. A century later it becomes crucial for Francis Bacon,
too, to find the right word; but now _this is the original name of each
thing, which was discovered by man in Paradise and which confers
power over it. That is a magical, rather than a rhetorical, fundamental
idea. Magic, too, presupposes that God's administration of the world
is characterized by a reduced level of attention and that he might not
notice if man, by means of a new power over things, procured for
himself an equivalent to Paradise, which would enable him to forget
his old sin. Theory and cunning renew their early alliance.
Bacon has a remarkable interpretation of the deceptive sacrifice:
Prometheus, he says, brought out, against the gods, the same kind of
foreground appearance to which men are subjected in the impene-
trability of the starry heavens for astronomical theory. This produces,
in spite of, or on account of, the sublimity of the object, the inadequacy
of their knowledge about it. Just as Prometheus does to Zeus with the
sacrificial bull, astronomy offers us only the external side of the world
of the heavens: the number, situation, motion, and periodicity of the
heavenly bodies, the hide, as it were, of the heavens (tan quam pellem
coeli).22 The meat, the inner parts, the substance - in the language of
theory, the causal relationships - are not there. But the cunning remains
on the side of the weaker party: Men create for themselves, with much
ingenuity - and occasionally with such absurd constructions as the
daily motion of the earth according to Copernicus ("quod nobis constat
falsissimum esse" [which I am convinced is most falseD! -an artificial
world of their sacrificial beast that meets their needs, even if it has
nothing to do with the real state of affairs in nature. 23
The connection to the configuration of Prometheus's deceptive sac-
rifice again puts man in the position of beneficiary, this time in relation
to his needs in the area of theory; he forgoes the truth so as not to
forgo altogether having a conception of the whole. With the help of
myth a theory comes into existence that looks like a theory of myth
itself, but is a theory of theory. The allegorical interpretation of the
theft of fire is more harmless; it shows Prometheus not in the role of
cunning but in that of taking advantage of accident. A blow with a
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piece of flint exhibits the spark, by producing it, and the theft consists
merely in getting permanently in hand what nature has exhibited in
passing. 24
If, in connection with the deceptive sacrifice, Bacon has in view the
lack of dependable reciprocity in the relationship between gods and
men, between the knowability of nature and man's actual state of
knowledge, then later, in his great allegorical interpretation of the
Prometheus story in the context of the mythical wisdom of antiquity,
the 'status' of man becomes, for him, that of the privileged center of
the world (homo veluti centrum mundi) under the providence represented
by Prometheus. 25 Apparently, however, this providence is something
that has to come to nature's aid, because man is originally a naked
and needy creature. That is why Prometheus gives him fire as the
epitome of what he can achieve, as the formaformarum [form of forms],
the instrumentum instrumentorum [instrument of instruments], the aux-
ilium auxiliorum [helper of helpers]. But why did this gift encounter
the displeasure of the gods?
The answer to this question stands in epochal contrast to the inter-
pretation of Prometheus's sufferings that Marsilio Ficino had given.
Man, Bacon says, too soon rested content with the effect of the agency
that was bestowed on him, accepted something preliminary as some-
thing final, and saw the summit of his development as having been
reached with the ancient world and its heritage, especially the heritage
of Aristotle. False finitude and satisfaction caused the living conscious-
ness of the origin of the heavenly gift to stagnate, rather than keeping
it alive by continual new use and new discoveries. The illegitimacy of
the possession of fire consists, then, in the possessor's being pacified
by his single and supposedly definitive acquisition. It is not the favor
of the gods that has been lacking in men's history-they themselves
have continued to owe themselves everything (ipsos sibi deesse).
Thomas Hobbes, in a note to his comparison of the three forms of
the state - democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy - applied an alle-
gorical interpretation of the Prometheus story to the preeminence of
the monarchical form; he sees the pantheon as subject to the patriarchal
authority of the one Jupiter. This preeminence must be not only
essential but also historical, because it is only by reference to it that
the theory of the political contract, as the rationality of the transition
from the state of nature to absolutism, can be displayed. The achieve-
ments of the other forms of that state could only be derived frOID the
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appropriation of formal elements [of absQlutisml in a situation in which

their original function is not recognized. The ancients, too, had seen
this in the figure of Prometheus. The theft of fire would mean that
by human invention, laws and justice were taken by imitation from
monarchy. Prometheus the shaper of man presents himself as the one
who animates the multitude, the dirt and dregs of mankind, as it were,
by means of fire that is removed from its natural source, into the
single civil person whose exercise of power is then called aristocracy
or democracy. The authors and abettors of this transfer of the original
principle, who could have lived securely and quietly under the natural
jurisdiction of kings, have to suffer the punishment, after their discovery,
of being raised to a high position and there being tormented by
perpetual cares, suspicions, and dissensions. 26,g
Prometheus on the Caucasu~ appears then as the demagogue who,
in the political state that is no longer rationally derived, carries the
burden of unnaturalness and instability of the offices and functions.
He has deviated from the initial condition of political reason, which
contains, as it were, the substance of everything it is capable of In
the process, the other forms of the state were put together artificially
by men (artificio hominum) from the ashes of monarchy, after it had
been ruined by seditions. Prometheus is this ingenium humanum [human
inventionl-fallen away from the origin of reason and forced into
unstable substitute constructions-itself But political skill is by its nature
incapable of being just in its own right, and is consequently dependent
on usurpation, on the 'theft of fire.'
Although, for Hobbes, existence in a state is practically defined by
the fact that it results from the overcoming of the internal contradiction
in the state of nature, subsequent history again exhibits the differ-
entiation of naturalness and artificiality. Rationality is entirely contained,
once and for all, in a single act and in the single condition resulting
from it. The nonsensical action that is prefigured by Prometheus is
the artistic frivolity of applying the human gift of invention once again,
to its [own original] result. Prometheus does not stand for the primary
act of the foundation of the state, whose form is prefigured, instead,
by Zeus's sovereignty, but for the rampant secondary artificiality whose
motive is seen in the envy that causes the opponents of monarchy to
pursue their political endeavors. Of them we are told that they would
surely withdraw themselves from under the dominion of one God, if
they could.
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Chapter 3
Jakob Brucker, the first author of lasting influence to compose a

history of philosophy following Bayle's precepts of historical criticism,
a history that was eagerly read by Goethe and was the main source
of Kant's knowledge of the older history of philosophy, made the
allegorical elevation of Prometheus to the role of the first philosopher
into a pedantic chapter of his historiography. True to his master, he
even discusses the question of the historical existence of Prometheus:
"To begin with, we are still not sure who Prometheus was; some even
maintain that there was never a man in the world who had that name,
but that the ancients understood by it the human mind, intelligence,
and prudence, which God gave men so that they could invent the
sciences that are necessary for human life." The attempts at finding
in the figure of Prometheus the reflection of biblical personages, of
Adam, Noah, Magog, Moses, are duly reported. To be sure, a "low
level of probability" is conceded to such interpretations. 27
That in a history of philosophy one had, in spite of all the doubts
about his existence, to speak of Prometheus results from the need to
test the assertion that one should regard him as the "first inventor of
all the good arts and sciences, and consequently also of philosophy,
among the Greeks." All of the stories attributed to this figure result
from what he had done for the Greeks, when he "improved their
savage and coarse manners, made their dispositions tame, and cul-
tivated them." For Brucker, the fashioning of men no longer has any
rebellious quality, any relationship to the Fall and the loss of Paradise.
Having fashioned men is only a metaphor for a civilizing performance
that "first brought the Greeks' savage dispositions into a human form."
In this context, for Prometheus to be punished would be totally un-
intelligible; the chaining to the Caucasus, therefore, is a misinterpre-
tation of his perseverance in the practice of science. It means that he
"devoted himself to astronomy, on these mountains, for a long time."
So, where it is a matter of eliminating contradictions, Brucker decides
in favor of the consistent version, whereas elsewhere historiography's
findings only need be inventoried: "Thus runs the story; but as to
what its meaning may be there is an endless amount of argument."
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Translator's Notes
a. Seinsgrundlosigkeit, the absence of a (sufficient) reason for existence.
b. Here, and throughout this translation, the word mythology (Mythologie) refers to the study and
interpretation of myths, not to the subject matter of that study and interpretation. (Though
admittedly the line becomes a fine one to the extent that "work on myth," through which
alone we can experience that subject matter, comes, as the author goes on to say here, to be
dominated by the external perspective of 'mythology. ')
c. Metamorphoses, trans. F. J Miller, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1916), p. 29 (translation slightly revised).
d. On mythological here, see translator's note b, above.
e. The allusion is to the train of thought exemplified in the Transcendental Dialectic of the
Critique if Pure Reason.
f. The Epistles if Erasmus, trans. F. M. Nichols (London: Longmans, Green, 1901), vol. 1, p. 21 7.
g. In translating the author's paraphrases of De cive in this paragraph and the next one, I have
used the language of Hobbes's own English version, in Thomas Hobbes, Man and Citizen (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Anchor Books, 1972), pp. 224-225.
4
Aesthetic Briglltening Up
To one who thinks philosophically, no story is a matter of indifference,

even if it were the natural history of t~e apes.
-Heinrich Martin Gottfried Koster, Uber die Philosophie der Historie
(1775)
While Giambattista Vico was not the first who would have granted
to myth, or restored to it, its own specific exercise of reason, he was,
in doing so, the first to have conceded that exercise to it 'systematically'
and in the great context of a theory of history, and, above all, to have
made this plausible to the taste of subsequent generations.
Vico's concept of history does not take part in Descartes's fiction
of the zero point. a That fiction conflicts with Vico's fundamental as-
sumption that history is the temporal form of experience and con-
sequently cannot set up its new beginnings without regard for what
has been and for what has been handed down. In this unity of a
history of experience that is common to all mankind the decisions
were made very early on. The nicest parallel for the way in which
that occurred is found in the discovery and naming of the constellations
by astronomy, which thus, in its very begirmings, committed perception
to a mythically imprinted system of figures as its means of orientation.
What appears does not only appear but imports something, too, or
expresses something. The power of imagination translates importance
and expression into stories, or extracts stories back out of them in
retrospect. There cannot be stories unless the bearers of ilnportance
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Part III
and expression have names. Paradisaic ,man was, first of all, a giver
of names; man who has been expelled from Paradise would have had
to be a name-finder-in embarrassment, he becomes a name-inventor.
The configuration of Prometheus, the eagle, and Hercules enables
Vi co to make one of his fundamental decisions: For him it is not the
fire-bringer but rather the vanquisher of monsters who establishes the
possibility of human life. We are reminded that, seen as a whole, the
Hellenic and Hellenistic world upholds this decision in favor of Hercules.
In any case, the service of freeing Prometheus from the eagle is present
only in the Attic version, whereas the Doric-Peloponnesian zone of
forms is not aware of Hercules's helpful supervention. The son of
Alcmene, with his deeds and with the physiognomies of those whom
he lays low, could ignite the imagination in a different way from the
sufferer on the Caucasus. One could also say that for Vico, Prometheus's
potter's work is too realistic, too paltry in its limitation to mere survival,
whereas Hercules is a figure of versatility in dealing with the world,
one who first proves himself fit for apotheosis. Prometheus appears,
in contrast to him, as the "model of the subject of the life-world who,
because he is ignorant, is driven by constant concern about the pres-
ervation of his existence."! For Vico, who believes that he knows how
myths arise from an original sense experience, Hercules stands for
what can be called, in the language I use, the "work of myth," with
regard to which only "work on myth" allows us to form conjectures-
while Prometheus is more the figure of a disabling anxiety, a figure
that Vico may have been led to see in this way, and consequently to
banish from the center of attention, by its allegorical interpretation
in Hobbes's Leviathan.
To Vico, Prometheus is suspect. He does not know that Prometheus
had helped Zeus in the struggle against the Titans. Above all, as one
who relies on names, he is disturbed by the separation of "providence"
from the most powerful divinity. b If the "poetic metaphysics" of myth
goes back to a primeval source of truth, if its main content is supposed
to be the "rational theology of providence in history, "c then this his-
torical agency cannot be in conflict with Jupiter. 2 The chaining to the
Caucasus is part of the binding of the giants by the highest authority;
these bonds include "fear of the sky and of Jupiter" and his lightning,
and the eagle (who here devours the heart itself) is "reverence for
Jupiter's auspices."
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Chapter 4
In the "Poetic Morals" the giants, and among them once again
Prometheus (whom Vi co does not associate with the Titans), being
tamed, become the founders of the nations and rulers of the first
communities. 3 Fear of the terrors of Jupiter made them desist from
their godlessness and their fight against heaven. The idea of Jupiter
was born entirely from extreme fear, but being domesticated as the
fear of others, it leads to a world in which even the giants have become
pious. For the spirit is inclined by its nature toward gigantism, and
has to be bent down to the earth by the recognition of God. But since
this happens in a story, the starting point is never the whole. For the
admirer of Hercules, fear can in fact be transformed into poetry, while
the giants become merely useful chiefs, forced into a settled state in
a retired life of dread of Jupiter's lightning. Retirement here means,
at the same time, a condition that is softened by modesty: The giants
hesitated to satisfy their bestial appetites under the open sky and
withdrew with their women into caves, so as to live there in a hidden
lifetime association of love. The origin of marriage as an institution
is inseparable from the retreat into caves, from fear of the terror of
lightning in the open, outside the enclosed space. So the cave is not
the original space, but rather the retreat taken by open defiance, a
forgoing of bestial restlessness, with the sexual bonus of a settled state.
Again, in the "Poetic Economics," Vico makes Prometheus serve
to bring fire from heaven, by taking it from the sun. Vico knows this
from the Roman cult of the tending of the sacred fire, which, if
negligence had allowed it to go out, could only be rekindled from the
sun. But the earliest purpose of the granting of fire was not handicraft
and art, but rather the clearing of forests. More than in this burning
down, Vico is interested in the problem of the subsequent fixing of
boundaries without the aid of armed public authority. Among wild
men, he says, this had been the business of a frightful religion, which
confined them within their bounds and consecrated their first walls
with bloody ceremonies. 4 In every case, what is important is to gain
the terminus a quo [point of departure] of history, which lies on this
side of the terrors and is supposed to be entirely pOiesis [making, creation]'
Here in the middle of the century of the Enlightenment and even
before the advent of Sturm und Drang, in Germany, the thesis that
genius (ingenium) creates the possibility of human life, by introducing
institutions and ordinances, figures and boundaries, into reality, is
already a Romantic fundamental idea.
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Part III
By opposing the Cartesian program of an absolute beginning directed

against everything hitherto existing (as being a possible handicap), Vico
avoided the unsolved central problem of the Enlightenment, the prob-
lem of how it was to comprehend itself historically. The Enlightenment
claims to have made a new beginning by virtue of natural reason,
and to be unable to lose this thread again. But it has the burden of
also having to explain, now, how this same reason could let things
get to the point where a radical historical incision even became nec-
essary. If reason is a constant in man's equipment, on which one was
supposed to be able to depend henceforth, it is only with difficulty
that one can understand why it had not been a constant in the history
of mankind from time immemorial. Reason's absolute self-establish-
ment, in its judicial quality, inevitably exposed its contingency - and
contingency does not make a future more reliable than its past.
The solution-or the attempt at a solution-lay in disparaging man
on the basis of other constituent parts of his makeup, so that the new
epoch could be set free, as capable of its accomplishment. Kant himself
describes the incompetence from which enlightenment was supposed
to enable men to emerge as "self-incurred" [selbstverschuldet],d but he
does not tell us what was the nature of this putting oneself in the
wrong [Selbstverschuldung] vis-a-vis a reason that now presented itself
as so confident of success. Evidently at the time of his often quoted
definition of enlightenment, in 1784, Kant was not yet ready, as he
was in his Religion book, ten years later/' to fit up the old dogma of
Original Sin philosophically, so as to provide himself with an early
starting point for reason's incompetence. And his hesitation was jus-
tified, because this solution involved the acceptance of a punishment
that manifestly implied the presence of an [exogenously] imposed
decree [Verhangnis] in history and took away the legitimacy and the
necessary sustenance of any self-willed elevation of man into a state
in which he would make full use of reason. This affinity between, on
the one hand, every assignment of responsibility for the corruption
of reason and, on the other hand, the dogma of Original Sin made
it more difficult for the Enlightenment to answer the question why
reason deprived itself of power.
In this regard Rousseau made himself clearer than most people
ventured to. He described the limits of man's environment in the state
of nature as the dernarcation line, the crossing of which-from the
most natural motives of curiosity and exotic desires-was bound to
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Chapter 4
lead history into a detour of \vhich the efforts as well as the gains
always produced new burdens and needs, from which, however, there
was no longer any way to return to rational poverty, either. Irre-
versibility was part of man's existence as a being judged capable of
any hardship, just as it was part of his history, even as a history that
had already miscarried. The original state could have been and would
have had to have been sufficient for reason, because it was sufficient
for self-preservation. More than that, reason does not include.
That the unreason of the historical detour, which is staged by reason,
cannot have fatal results seems to be guaranteed by the fact that
reason, in its turn, consists in being induced, by the demands resulting
from its errors, to practice control and compensatory steering. Reason
regulates the unreason that it set in motion in such a way that it can
be survived by means of ruthlessness toward itself (hence the idea of
the critique of reason).
This conception has all the characteristics that readily suggest a
glance at Prometheus. Rousseau begins the second part of his prize
essa y in response to the question proposed by the Academy of Dijon
in 1 750 with a reference to an Egyptian ancestor of Prometheus, the
god Theutus, who, by inventing the sciences, had become un dieu
ennemi au repos des hommes [a god inimical to the repose of mankind].
The original note to the text refers to a seldom noticed subsidiary
form of the Greek treatment of Prometheus: the Prometheus Pyrkaeus,
the fragment of a satyr play by Aeschylus, in the anecdotal form in
which it is transmitted in Plutarch. In it the satyr, seeing fire for the
first time, wants to kiss it and embrace it, but Prometheus cautions
him not to singe his beard: "Satyre, tu pleureras la barbe de ton
menton, car il brule quand on y touche" [Satyr, you will mourn the
beard on your chin, because (fire) burns when one touches it]. So
Prometheus brings fire - and he warns of the consequences of his
stolen gift. Rousseau was bound to be pleased by that, and he does
not hesitate to abbreviate the text from Plutarch by a crucial clause;
for in that text Prometheus had added to his warning, " ... but it gives
light and warmth."5 It is by this line of descent, then, that Prornetheus
comes to appear on the title page of the "First Discourse."
Christoph Martin Wieland published his "Dream Conversation with
Prometheus" in 1 7 70, in connection with his essay "On the experiments
proposed by J. J. Rousseau for discovering the true state of man's
nature. "Ii Here the newly established connection bet\veen the exegesis
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Part III
of Prometheus and the Enlightenment question about the nature of

man is more manifest than it is in Rousseau himself Wieland sees
Rousseau's problem as that of determining man's natural constitution
through experience under conditions that have long since eliminated
this natural constitution. Fortunately for the reader, the sophisticated
iteration that asks whether "in the bosom of society" the faculty of
experience itself would not be deformed to the point of producing an
inability to distinguish what is natural is not considered.
What one can describe as the Platonic problem of such an inves-
tigation-namely, the problem that one must already know what one
seeks, in advance, so as to be able to prepare the means of investigation
accordingly-is introduced as a [logical] circle: "For if these means
have to be chosen in such a way that we can be sure that we ourselves
have not foisted on nature the answer that it is supposed to give us,
then-we must already know human nature very accurately; but it is
precisely because we would like to know it that these experiments
are supposed to be made." Wieland discusses the paradoxes that
would necessarily be produced by the experiment of making human
children grow up outside society. But his thesis is that such an ex-
periment would be entirely unnecessary, even if the necessary pre-
conditions for it could be produced, because it could not teach us
anything new. Human history, he says, rather than being the monstrous
perversion of what is possible in nature, is, in fact, the execution, on
the largest possible scale, of the experir,nent that Rousseau proposes.
The state of nature is the sum of the conditions determining the state
of history. "The great experiment has been under way on this earth
for many thousands of years already, and nature itself has taken pains
to direct it, so that nothing is left for the Aristotles and Plinys of every
age except to open their eyes and see how nature has operated from
time immemorial, and still operates, and will undoubtedly operate in
the future .... No, my dear Rousseau, however poor we wretches
ma y be, we are at least not so to such a monstrous extent that after
the experience of so many centuries we should still have to undertake
new, unheard-of experiments in order to find out-what nature intends
rlor us. "
If the experiment with subjects untouched by society in the bosom

of society neither can be made nor needs to be made, then it becomes
what is now only an aesthetic configuration, "of the possibility of which
one can at least dream." The dreamer finds himself in the mountains,
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Chapter 4
before Prometheus, who is chained to the rock. The two become "the
best of friends in a moment, as commonly happens in dreams."
The dreamer believes that he sees before him the real author of
the human species, who had made men out of clay and water "and
found means to give them-I don't know how-this wonderful 1-
don't-know-what that they call their soul." Prometheus wants news
of men, how they are doing and what use they make of their existence.
The dreamer gives particulars, but he would rather not say what they
were. In any case, he says, Prometheus then shook his head and said
something on the subject that was by no means a panegyric of his
cousin Jupiter, of whom he says that he "did not grant him [Prometheus]
the satisfaction of making his creatures happy." The dreamer tells
Prometheus that the sages had endeavored to remedy this situation,
and one of their suggestions had been to return to the state of nature.
In response to Prometheus's query, the dreamer reports, without ap-
pearing very well disposed toward the idea, that people pictured this
state of nature as " ... thinking nothing, desiring nothing, doing nothing,
concerning oneself not at all with other people, not much about oneself,
and least of all about the future .... "
Here something happens that hardly ever happens in philosophical
dialogues, even those in dreams, and that no tragedy could have
allowed in the fettered god's pitiable condition: Prometheus bursts out
in "hearty laughter." For he evidently remembers one of the earliest
philosophical scenes, in which there is also laughter- the tumble of
the protophilosopher Thales, at which the Thracian maid was an on-
looker. What he says is that the contemporary philosophers are still
like their predecessors, if they "never see what is right before their
noses because they have gotten used to always looking who knows
how far above their noses." That is almost word for word the com-
mentary that the Thracian maid, in Plato, makes on her laughter. 7
Wieland's satyric trick is that he makes the mythical creator of man
come forward against the philosophical absolutism of naturalness: "But
I think after all that I, who made men, should know best how I made
them." Of course, the 'maker of men' cannot expect to accomplish
much with this argument (which suits the dreamer's century so well):
"Your philosophers do not seem to me to be the kind of people \vho
let themselves be instructed by Prometheus .... " Prometheus says
they would behave no differently from Jupiter, who described the
men whom Prometheus made as a "foolish, botched piece of \vork."
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Part III
He would have accomplished something better even if he had been

intoxicated by nectar.
How had Prometheus come to make men? Here, there is a gap to
fill in the myth. It was at a moment when he had nothing better to
do, Prometheus tells the dreamer, that he hit upon the idea of pop-
ulating the earth with living creatures, with animals of every kind,
"among which some are grotesque enough in appearance to betray
the mood in which I made them." It is the world of Rococo, not that
of the ancient world's cosmos, that comes into being here. Even when
Prometheus "finally took a fancy to try a species that would be meant
as an intermediate race between us gods and my animals," this was
still "a mere game." But it unexpectedly turned out to be a creature
for which he felt the inception of "a kind of love," so that he resolved
to make them happy creatures. What was in his mind was a musical
instrument with infinitely subtle strings, on which nature would play
the most beautiful harmony.
Wieland's intention evidently was that this belated decision to enter
into a moral commitment in relation to the product of a pastime
should explain the difficulty of human nature, and the fate it was to
have. Thus we get a Pygmalion fable, which again demonstrates, even
in the sculptor's recollection, his enthusiasm for his product. It made
him risk the wrath of his paramount divine relative in order to procure
happiness for men. Prometheus cannot understand how they have
managed not to become happy. After this initially logical interpretation
of his own work, the Titan has recourse to the desperate means that
had become attached to his own nlyth as a sort of theodicy: It must
have been Pandora's box, the container of the "thousand needs dressed
in the color of pleasure."
Strictly speaking, the Prometheus of the dream turns out to be a
Rousseauist himself: He gave his men, he says, just as much under-
standing as they needed "in order to be happier than they would
have been through the senses alone." But when Prometheus describes
the idyll of the state of nature, of the original pastoral scene, he loses
all credibility for the dreamer because then even more incomprehen-
sible causality falls to an exogenous trick, to the calamity of Pandora.
What will the dreamer who remains so unsatisfied make of Pandora's
container when he awakens? "What kind of a box could that be, after
all, that was able to produce so much misfortune?" Wieland, in 1770,
finally makes of Pandora's fatal box still another piece of Rococo. It
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Chapter 4
was, he says, a real box in the literal sense of the word, namely, a
box of cosmetics.
The argument with Rousseau ends in a parody of Rousseau: The
supposed uselessness of human culture is concentrated in the fashion
of false youth and beauty, the embodiment of the difference between
seeming and being, the wretched propensity to deceive "human na-
ture's artless innocence and candor." The possibility of seeming to be
what one is not quickly spread, Wieland says, to all areas of man's
life: Just as there was no longer any natural face, neither was there
any natural character. "Everything was made up and falsified: made-
up piety, made-up friendship, made-up statesmanship, made-up
eloquence. Heavens! What was not made up? Human society now
resembled a great masquerade .... " But this art of appearance was
naturally followed by the other, the art of dealing with appearance,
of penetrating it, so as not to be a victim of it, or briefly put, by the
necessity of "always thinking of new arts by means of which to frustrate
this art." Devices are followed by counterdevices, masquerade is fol-
lowed by unmasking, cosmetics by the pathos of the naked truth,
rhetoric by the demand to get down to the facts. f The process that
was initiated in myth becomes independent, and winds up entirely in
man's hands. His reason shows itself to be an iterative faculty. It has
to revert, again and again, to what seems to lie behind it; as critique,
it is again in need of critique-quousque tandem.'? [How long will this
go on?].
The native readiness with which men reached for Pandora's box
of cosmetics, so as to be consumed entirely in the technique and
countertechnique of appearance, leads Wieland from his Prometheus
dream to the final thesis of his treatise-that humans would have lost
their original state even if there had never been a Pandora and her
box. Prometheus could consider men happy because he, exiled to the
Caucasus, had no longer been a witness of their history: "One had
to be as extremely enamored of his own product as he was, not to
see where the mistake lay."
But where did it lie? "Creatures whose innocence and happiness
depend on their ignorance ... are always in a very insecure posi-
tion .... " Only now does one understand why, in the "Drearrl Con-
versation, " there was no mention of the theft of fire: The Enlightenment
could not be allowed to have taken place through Prolnetheus if it
was to be able to take place in the eighteenth century. Prometheus's
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Part III
mistake, demonstrated by history up to. this point, was supposed to

prove to be a small defect in a conception that, as a whole, was
successful, and thus not something requiring intervention from on
high. Not quite enough understanding- that had to be something that
could be made up for by an educational program.
When Wieland in 1792, in the next to the last of his Dialogues of the
Gods, again touches on the Prometheus myth, the prospect has grown
darker. The Revolution had finished off the Rococo. Rousseau's ex-
pectations had not been fulfilled; the costumed shepherds had not
been replaced by primeval natural men but by the equally costumed
virtuous citizens of the ancient Roman Republic. The political dispute
on Olympus about the philosophical parentage of the Revolution leads
very quickly from the "sans-culottes," by way of the "Cynics," to the
"natural men," who, rather than any philosopher, had been "the true
prototypes of sans-culottism, the sans-culottes in the purest and noblest
sense of this honorable name," if Zeus's "progressive" daughter, Mi-
nerva, should be correct. And things would return to this original
condition, in the final result of liberty and equality, "if people were
serious about these things, and these beautiful, but evilly abused words
did not merely serve a band of cunning deceivers as talismans with
which to rebel with impunity against any authority and order that
wants to set limits to their lust for power and their covetousness."8
Wieland makes his Jupiter think that the moderate core of the great
clamor lies in the intention, through an "entirely exceptional trans-
formation of the whole nation," to prepare the promised golden age,
at least for a future generation, by means of an "entirely new kind
of national education," which "will not come to pass among those
who are now alive, but of which, when it has finally taken root, the
third or the fourth generation will certainly see the fruits." One must
only, he says, be able to wait. To Minerva's realism it seems implausible
that a capacity for waiting, however great, could ever enable the most
distant posterity to enjoy the promised fruits.
Here the name of Prometheus is mentioned once again, so as to
formulate an antithesis between naturalness and artificiality. No effort
on the part of art could make possible, we are told, what nature has
made impossible, "and Prometheus would just have to find an entirely
new clay, and shape an entirely new kind of men from it," in order
to people the Revolution's utopian republic with them. It had not been
enough to grind the monarchy into dust, to produce from it the plastic
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Chapter 4
stuff for the new creatures. It is not the philosophical program of

utopia that is mocked by the family of the gods, but Prometheus's
demiurgic inadequacy. The mythical state of affairs still holds-man
is not in fact a legitimate creation of the gods to whose world order
such ideas could have been related. The philosophical work of art
called utopia cannot appeal to the given world order, because it is
powerless against the split that is inherent in man's original history.
Jupiter is full of resignation. From boredom, since Theodosius's
decree, he has become a philosopher, and that makes him doubt
whether reason could have been cultivated by the cultural process of
history. "To say nothing of the fact that we gods have lost more than
half of our power along with men's belief in us, would I, for example,
make them more rational by means of lightning and thunderbolts? ...
Haven't we, on our side, long since done everything we could to help
them overcome the imperfection and weakness of their ambiguous
nature?" The gods had led man out of his original savage state, es-
tablished family and society, made life easier with agriculture and
beautified it with the arts, introduced laws, religion, and police, and
sent them the Muses and philosophy, "so as to free them from every
vestige of the animal-like savagery of their original condition." Men
had been happy and had remained so as long as they had allowed
themselves to be ruled by the gods. But the perfection of this guidance
had at the same time produced the illusion that it was unnecessary.
"We brought them so far that finally they thought they could do
without us; they turned our own benefactions against us, gave us notice
that they didn't require our services any longer, ran after a new
phantom of superhuman perfection, and fell without noticing it-by
scorning and neglecting the means by which we had made them into
men - into a barbarism that bordered very closely on the crude bes-
tiality of their original condition."
It is evidently the dark Middle Ages following ancient paganism
that is meant to be portrayed, from Jupiter's perspective. The Re-
naissance appears as a short interlude of recollection of the original
sources of culture, which again was ruined by the old game, because
"the epoch of the highest enlightenment was always the one in which
every kind of speculative madness and practical fanaticism were in
fullest swing." The education of the human race has failed because
"such weak and impermanent creatures as these pottery products of
Prometheus's" have not stood the test.
388
Part III
Assuming the thesis that myth, as th.e earliest way of processing

the terrors of the unknown and of overwhelming power, is itself a
mode of action that contributes to the humanization of the world, and
that work on myth continues this action as a historical one, the question
necessarily arises as to the reflexive comprehension of this function
and the potential for pursuing its immanent tendency: for humanizing
what is already humanization. To put the question differently: When
was what had always had to be accomplished (and had in fact been
accomplished) raised to the status of a program and made explicit?
That this could be connected with the level of reflection that is char-
acteristic of historicism is something that one will be able to presume
from the outset.
Herde~ published his scenes entitled "Prometheus Unchained" in
the Adrastea g in 1802. Both the manuscript on which the printed version
was based and another one, deviating from it, have been preserved.
The text is preceded by a prologue dedicating it to old Gleim. h We
know what gave rise to this dedication. Gleim had written to Herder
on November 14, 1802, in praise of another poetical work, the melo-
drama Ariadne, but had at the same time hinted that if he were still
in possession of his powers as a writer he would write about the
"inhuman myths of the Greeks" and declare himself in opposition to
them. The most potent example is ready to his hand, because he has
just read Stolberg's translation of Aeschylus's Prometheus tragedy. This
myth seems to him "to be one of the most inhuman. A friend of
mankind is so frightfully punished! What benefit can such a myth
have among us, we who have better concepts of the gods?"9
Herder believes that he can undertake to provide the counter-
demonstration, and even has it ready. Caroline answers Gleim on
December 30, saying that her husband had just created his Prometheus
Unchained, as a "picture," when Gleim's "encouragement to make the
inhuman myths of the ancients more human arrived." There is the
formula that will still be used, again, by Thomas Mann. Gleim himself
had not written anything about making the myths more humane;
instead, he had discovered his abhorrence of them, from the example
of Prometheus, and declared himself their opponent. But at that point
Herder had already completed a piece of work on myth that he could
oppose to this abhorrence.
The prologue addressed to Gleim does not make any effort to
contradict the reproach that myth is inhuman. Herder acknowledges
389
Chapter 4
that he has always been of Gleim's opinion, that "the harsh mythology
of the Greeks, from the earliest times, should not be employed by us
except in a mild and human way."IO Therefore his experiment in such
application should not (as its genre alone would make clear) be com-
pared to Aeschylus's tragedy; it does not even claim the title of drama.
But if one should not venture "to continue Prometheus's character,
as Aeschylus portrays it, in our time," then what is it in the antecedent
content of myth that remains binding? It is, so Herder's dry response
runs, "a very instructive emblem."
This may have seemed to Herder himself to be insufficiently in-
formative. He places himself, therefore, in the tradition of allegory,
and makes myth itself into a material that derives from the fire that
Prometheus stole and brought to men, so that anyone who performs
work on this substance of a higher origin fulfills an obligation that is
binding for mankind. The elements of the myth are "such a rich
material for the cultivation of a spiritual meaning in their figures that
they seem to cry to us: 'Use the fire that Prometheus brought you,
for yourselves! Let it shine brighter and more beautifully, for it is the
flame of the forever continuing cultivation [Bildung] of man.' " Thus,
to justify his purpose Herder not only sets up myth in the role of
allegory, he also relates the method of what he has in mind to a
freedom with the tradition that seems to be specific to him. Francis
Bacon and others, he says, have been granted the liberty to put their
meaning into the myth-to whom, then, should this freedom be de-
nied? Especially "when he puts the noblest, perhaps also the most
natural meaning into them, the cultivation and further cultivation of
the human race to every kind of culture; the striving of the divine
spirit in man toward the awakening of all of his powers."
Here there is nothing more to be feared than that, on these premises,
the mythical Prometheus would have become good-natured and phil-
istine. The stage directions make him sit on the rocks, rather than
standing on them. In the manuscript, at least, his shackled condition
is softened into a "loosely fettered" one, which the text of the first
monologue also confirms when it says not only that time helps one
bear anything but also that
bei hochherzigeITI gefassten Muth
Die Bande selbst sich weiten ...
lWhen courage is nobly taken
390
Part III
the bonds themselves become less tight .- .. ]

But above all, this Prometheus does not suffer from the futility of his
suffering. His greatest source of comfort is his philosophy of history.
Prometheus's chains are an allegory of the incomplete history of his
creatures:
Wenn der Starkste deiner Menschen
Die grosste That vollbracht hat, wenn du selbst
Die Tapferste vollftihrt, dann losen sich
Die F esseln, und du siehst dein grosses Werk
Gedeihn auf Erden.
[When the strongest of your men
Has accomplished the greatest deed, when you yourself
Have carried out the bravest one, then
The fetters loose themselves, and you see your great work
Succeed on earth.]
Later his mother Themis will say to the liberated Prometheus, from
her throne, that his being chained to the rocks of the Caucasus had
been nothing but a way of aiding his own objectives, preventing ex-
cessive demiurgic hastiness with man's history, persuading the Olym-
pians themselves to become friends to men:
Hattest du,
Was langsam nur geschehen konnte, schnell
Und riistig iibereilt; du hattest selbst
Dein Werk zertriimmert . . .
[If you
Had quickly and vigorously pressed forward
What could only happen slowly, you would have
Wrecked your own undertaking .. .]
Prometheus pushes the cause of his human beings with the other
gods, and in exemplary fashion with Oceanus. This is a compound
of natural-law and biblical elements. Prometheus rejects the sea god's
grievance about being disturbed by man, the seafarer, with an argument
deriving from the Stoic tradition:
1m weiten Welten-Raum
Gehoret Alles Allem.
[In the vast space of worlds
391
Chapter 4
Everything belongs to everything.]

That is the principle in accordance with which even the theft of fire
appears merely as the first advantage taken of natural law. It becomes
the putting-into-effect of a property right in nature, which men had
merely been too weak to implement. Prometheus, the demiurge, is
on the side of demiurgic man against the old principle of nature's
untouched status as terra inviolata [unharmed earth]. Men, so he an-
nounces to Oceanus, would change the boundaries of his realm, com-
bine one sea with another or separate them-and in response to
Oceanus's question whether that would be done justly, the Titan merely
refers him to the fact that men would have the strength to do it. In
the manuscript draft that differs from the printed version it says:
Der Mensch, wenn es ihm frommt
SolI, was er kann.
[Man, if it is to his advantage
Should do what he can do.]
Herder thought he had done all that was necessary to make the
Prometheus myth appear humane when he showed the gods as converts
to Prometheus and thus to man's right to existence. In the divergent
draft he has a final scene between Prometheus and his old patroness,
Pallas Athena, in which she pronounces the moral of the story that
is connected with his name - that "foresight" without virtuous deeds
is pernicious-and awards the Titan the victory (which, however, ac-
cording to the divine order, he can no longer win):
der Gotter Gottlichstes
Und Seligstes wird reine Menschlichkeit.
[the most divine
and blessed part of the gods becomes pure humanity.]
The harshness of the myth had consisted in seeing man's llTev-
ocability and his right to life as being won by the Titan's indolnitability,
not by his victory. It was a myth of man's indestructibility, not of the
completion of his happiness, a completion that had to remain beyond
his ken and implausible for him. That is why, contrary to Herder's
deceptively attractive intention, the authentic lnyth seelns 1110re hu-
mane than these "Scenes" on the threshold between Enlightenlnent
and Romanticism. In the myth Zeus does learn of the threat to his
power, but he averts it by forgoing definitiveness in his reveng~. In
392
Part III
the divergent manuscript of Herder's ':York he makes Prometheus

answer the question, conveyed by Mercury, of the secret of the threat
to Jupiter's power by saying that the god will precipitate himself from
the throne: The gods are already abandoning Olympus in order to
choose the earth-as it is cultivated and transformed by man-as
their heaven. The allegorical interpretation of the myth declares the
end of myth, this time as a result of the emigration of its gods.
Herder's Adrastea is a work of the tum of the century. It suggests
the definitiveness of the successes of the past century and the per-
spective of the incipient century. But there is something in Kant's
judgment that Herder was "a great artist of illusion," and in Goethe's
that "his existence was an incessant blowing of bubbles." The Pro-
metheus scenes make the relief too easy for themselves. It is as though
he had never taken notice ofJacobi's publication of the "Prometheus"
ode in the Spinozism dispute,i in which Herder too, after all, took part
with his God dialogues in 1 787) True, the unsettled state of the in-
nermost conflict first became recognizable when Goethe again took
up the material, with his Pandora, but it should at least have been a
restraint operating against this kind of lightweight solution. To put it
differently, Herder had failed to observe how much work on myth,
as manifested by the work on this one myth, still remained to be
done.
The issue of the particular sources that are drawn upon in opening
out the late horizons of myth is certainly not insignificant. An important
factor is the great delay with which the Greek texts became accessible
and known beyond the narrowest circle of philologians. For Prome-
theus, that holds especially for Aeschylus's tragedy. Mostly, however,
the breadth of variety of the alterations that take place in the reception
is founded in the peculiarities of information coming from second or
third hand. One may wonder how Goethe's first work on the Pro-
metheus myth would have come out if he had encountered a source
different from the mythological lexicon of the pedant, Hederich-for
example, the source that would have been most obvious in the decade
of this poetical work: the French Encyclopedia.
On account of the compulsion of alphabetical completeness, works
of this sort, particularly in their peripheral topics, often represent
yesterday's spirit of the age more than tomorrow's, which they were
aimed at. But this same programmatic weakness leaves room for an
exceptional treatment, whereas the article that for its part already
393
Chapter 4
carries emphasis-say, an article by someone like Diderot-no longer

confers the license for an energetic exploitation of it as an opportunity,
because it has already laid claim to that license itself. That is why an
originality in reception is so often based on a substrate the antecedent
content of which is mediocre.
The article "Promethee" is in the thirteenth volume of the Ency-
clopedia, which appeared in 1765. The article is signed "D.].," so it
comes from De Jaucourt, who is certainly not to be counted among
the avante-garde of the Encyclopedists. He consciously avoids, in the
myth, the pagan harshness, so as to make the most of its agreeableness
as an aesthetic allegory. Prometheus, the son of Iapetus and the beautiful
Oceanid, Clymene, does, it is true, first make a man out of clay from
the earth, but that does not make him the demiurge of mankind, but
only the first sculptor of their effigies. Here that is no longer an
inducement to polytheism but rather an avoidance of every kind of
metaphysical offensiveness in favor of the purest Rococo. Instead of
creating man and pledging himself to man's fate, Prometheus only
formed the first statue of man out of clay and taught mankind by
that means merely how to manufacture their own works of art: "11
fut Ie premier qui enseigna aux hommes la statuaire." A culture-
founder, then, who hardly had to do with the first removal of man
from his savage state, but only with his final refinement.
Think how difficult it would have become for Goethe to construct
the most defiant lines of his ode k if he had been referred to a Prometheus
who had not made men after his own image but had only had to
fabricate images after the image of someone else.
The Encyclopedist's second leveling off of the myth relates to Pro-
metheus's being chained in the Caucasus. No more is allowed to
happen now except that the Titan, who had helped Jupiter in over-
coming the Titans, is forced to withdraw into the mountains, "from
which he did not dare to depart as long as Jupiter's power lasted."
What gnaws at his liver is simply anxiety about preserving his life in
such a desert land as this, in which the Scythians live, who always
had to bear the brunt of everything desolate and \vild. Only as a
question is the possibility added that perhaps the vulture could also
be a living image of the profound and wearisome meditations of a
philosopher: " ... au bien ce vautour ne seroit-il point une image
vivante des profondes and penibles meditations d'un philosophe?"
Here a piece of the tradition is taken up again according to \vhich
394
Part III
Prometheus in the Caucasus was suppos~d to have practiced theory,

if not professionally then at least as a consolation, especially the theory
[contemplation] of the starry heavens. In that case Zeus's whole punitive
proceedings against him could even appear as the mistake that could
be derived from what would have been, to crude Scythian minds, the
incomprehensible sight of the Titan abandoned to the contemplation
of the universe.
The Encyclopedist is not satisfied with such an autarkic ancient
theoretician's role. As culture-bringer and enlightener, Prometheus
executes, even in the place of his exile or withdrawal, the function of
the age by seeking to educate the lawless and unmannered inhabitants
of the Caucasus to a vie plus humaine [more human life]. The author
of the article asks whether this - the practice of enlightenment on the
object of the greatest resistance and therefore of the smallest likelihood
of success-could not have given rise to the mythical hyperbole of
saying that Prometheus, with the help of Zeus's daughter, Minerva,
the patroness of all education, had 'formed' man in the beginning:
" ... c'est peut-etre ce qui a fait dire qu'il avoit forme l'homme avec
l'aide de Minerve."
In keeping with the epoch [in which this version is written], the
element of the theft of fire turns into the history of the industrialization
of the Scythians' country. Prometheus sets up workshops there for
metalworking, and this makes it appropriate, as a subordinate aspect,
that he might have been the first to import fire, in the stem of a plant
described as a "stick plant" [Steckenkraut; the French original is "ferule"],
which must have been adapted to its preservation and transport over
a period of several days.
The Scythians seem not to have shown themselves particularly
grateful for their cultivation. But the motive that causes Prometheus
to terminate his stay in the Caucasus is the absolutely characteristic
motive of the century of the Encyclopedia: He is bored, "ennuye du
triste sejour" [tired of the cheerless sojourn]. He goes back to Greece,
to end his days there and experience the honors shown to a god, or
at least those shown to a hero.
If one follows the Encyclopedist's systematics in every detail, then
the precondition of this return was the end of Zeus's authority. So the
end of the story [Geschichte] already falls within history [die Geschichte].
True, the Enlightenment author st.ill sees it in the pagan context, but
nevertheless sees it as the process by which the gods lose their power.
395
Chapter 4
Because 'history' has already begun, Prometheus can again choose

freely where he wants to stay and, though an opponent and victim
of Zeus, can enjoy veneration-in the polis that has been so far en-
lightened by the Academic philosophy-in the grove of the Academy.
Only after the termination of the absolute power of the mythical gods,
and as they begin to be aestheticized, is it possible for one of their
own, after completing civilizing work in a distant land, and motivated
by boredom, to return to the polis as a highly honored guest and-
the text leaves no other alternative-to die there. The interpretation
of the one myth is, again, the story of myth itself.
Now, if this historicization of the myth is to be secured, all the harsh
and gruesome features of the myth must be blamed solely on the
author of the tragedy. It is only in connection with it that the con-
tradiction arises that the supposed inventor of the arts and skills, the
originator of all the useful knowledge in the world, is nevertheless
unable to do anything against Zeus's tyranny. For the tragedy, we are
told, it is ultimately not power but destiny that determines what happens
with the gods. Jupiter cannot think of anything to do against the
knowledge of the future and thus of the end of his own power except
to make the sufferer, Prometheus, disappear into the depths of the
earth with a terrible whirlwind. In view of such crude and unaesthetic
terrors, in the distortion of the myth in the tragedy, the Encyclopedist
is only able to conclude his article with an exclamation of incredulous
amazement that the dramatic presentation of such things could have
pleased people: "que tout ce spectacle devoit etre beau!" [(Imagine)
that this whole spectacle is supposed to be beautiful!).
Translator's Notes
a. Descartes's "zero point" would be reason's point of departure in constructing knowledge

"fi'om scratch," after the process of methodical doubt has cleared away everything but the
"clear and distinct ideas."
b. The name Prometheus means "forethought" or "providence."
c. This translation of "teologia civile rationata della providenza" follows E. Auerbach's German
translation, which Blumenberg uses. A more neutral translation would be "rational theology
of providence in the world of men. "
d. In "An Answer to the Q).lestion: 'What Is Enlightenment?' " in Kant's Political l'l'ritings, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 57.
396
Part III
e. Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft [Religion within the limits of reason alone]
(I 793). .
f Literally, "to the things" [zu den Sachen], Edmund Husserl's watchword.
g. Adrastea was a journal that Herder edited and published from 1801 to 1803.
h. J. W. Ludwig Gleim (I 719-1803), a popular author of lyrics and ballads.
i. This is discussed at length in the next chapter.
j. Gatt,' einige Gesprache (Gotha, 1 787).
k. See translator's note a to part 4, chapter 1, for the text of Goethe's "Prometheus" ode.
Part IV
Against a God, Only a God
Introduction
Everything up to this point in this book has a gradient; all the lines
converge on a hidden vital point at which the work expended on myth
could prove to be something that was not fruitless. It was not fruitless
if it could feed into the totality of one life, could give it the contours
of its self-comprehension, its self-formulation, indeed its self-forma-
tion - and this in a life that is open for our access, without the merciful
hiding places that we all demand for ourselves. For the reserved manner
of "subtle silence" in which, according to Nietzsche's remark, Goethe
was an expert did so little to remove him from view that not much
has been left for supposedly pitiless 'unmaskings' to do.
Other people are not lessened in value because one person con-
summated what is possible for everyone. Who could ever have felt
humiliated by Goethe? Buy why do our thoughts still circle around
this massif, when no one really knows any longer what a steward in
little Weimar can have been? When all the circumstances of this life
scarcely seem like favorable ones anymore, \vhether one considers
natural character or experience of the world, and when the de-
mythologizers have laid bare the rigidity, the ungenerosity, the of-
ficeholder's mentality, and, finally, the egotism of this minister to a
petty prince?
It is no exemplary life, the life of this theater director and collector
of anything and everything, not the life of a possible guide and escort
in the discovery or invention of the meaning of existence. But on the
other hand, is there another life that we have ever seen spread out
400
Part IV
before us in such multifarious relation to reality and illusion? Another

life whose continuous formation in self-gain and self-loss, self-creation
and self-disillusionment, has become comparably intelligible for us?
Nor was that in the form, crude, or intended as crude, of a reckless
exposure even approaching that of Rousseau's Confessions, but rather
as a result of the 'work' on reality-in all the shades, from bright to
dark, that it can tum toward life - that was accomplished in it.
Part of this is also his unique way of being affected [by things], his
sensitivity to images, to the accuracy with which they mesh with life's
articulations. There is no frivolous overestimation of self that we do
not find in this existence; but neither is there any serious self-retraction
that was not the result of a gain in reality. Even if here, as from all
history, we have to learn that we cannot learn anything, we see how
to go about coping with what cannot be learned, in the midst of the
illusions of learnability.
So this is not the life, not even a life, that can still elicit from us the
admiration that went with past enthusiasms for culture [Bildung]. But
the unique effort expended on this life certainly can do so-the effort
that not only links up with work on myth through appropriation and
variation and through its search for images, but that could not otherwise
become perceptible for itself. At the same time, this experience itself
has no mythical quality-it lends itself, we have seen, neither to tragedy
nor to comedy. Amazingly, it is what Goethe imagines about himself
that brings about his relation to myth: his self-deification as the Sturm
und Drang creator, his surmounting of the historical catastrophe of
1789, his elevation by and against Napoleon, and his finishing with
the world task of Faust. What toil, what illusions! And what transparency
of both in their interweaving before the eye of the onlooker!
But where does this leave reason? In the capacity still to master
the antirational with the resources of this kind of intellectual orga-
nization. Goethe writes to his friend Zeiter on March 19, 1827, regarding
the death of Zelter's only son, Georg, that he believes in the immortality
of the monad that is "hardened" by its life's activity. The world spirit
directs it, he says, to new activities, for which it had to qualify itself
here. Thus "it cannot lack employment for eternity." Goethe retracts
this glimpse of his private transposition of the postulate from Kant's
philosophya (a philosophy that he had never assimilated, and only
looked into out of deference to Schiller) almost in the very moment
401
Introduction
in which he thinks that he has to say this to his mourning friend-

retracts it in order immediately to justify the comforting myth: "Forgive
me these abstruse expressions, but people have always lost themselves
in such regions, and tried to communicate through such manners of
speaking, where reason could not reach but they nevertheless did not
want to let unreason rule." No one has ever articulated more precisely
why reason admits needs, which it arouses itself, without being able,
in its regular discipline, to satisfy them: not in order to acquire secretly,
after all, the excess that is denied to it, but in order not to let unreason
gain power over the unoccupied space. b
Goethe expressed this in the twentieth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit,
which he left behind him at his death, as the summation of what it
had been possible to see "in detail in the course of this biographical
recital": the unresolved remainder of his experience to which he gives
the title of the "demonic." What matters is not this title and the
interpretive eagerness to which it has given rise; what matters is the
'remainder.' It is sufficiently defined by negations: "It was not divine,
because it seemed nonrational; not human, because it had no under-
standing; not diabolic, because it was beneficent; not angelic, because
it often betrayed a malicious delight .... It was only in the impossible
that it seemed to find pleasure, while it rejected the possible with
contempt." Goethe does not flirt with this intimacy; instead he seeks
to escape "from this fearful principle," and he does this precisely not
in the way that Socrates describes his intellectual deliverance - as taking
refuge "in the 'logoi' "[reasons, Ideas]- but rather as taking refuge
"behind an image." Both are refuges - the one in concepts, the other
behind an image - but Goethe is not a philosopher, just because it is
behind an image that he takes refuge.
Goethe had described the process by which he "took refuge," the
process of the search for and choice of an image, in the fifteenth book
of Dichtung und Wahrheit, the last of the books that he personally
dispatched to the printer. He had become aware of his natural gift
of creativity and had wanted to "found my whole existence on this,
mentally." Then: "This idea transformed itself into an image: I was
struck by the old mythological figure of Prometheus, the Prometheus
who, separated from the gods, peopled a world from his workshop."c
402
Part IV
Translator's Notes
a. See translator's note i to part 2, chapter 4.
b. The German is iibers Unbesetz.te. Once again, the metaphor of an 'idea-space' that is "occupied"
(besetz.t) and "reoccupied"-the central process that was analyzed in The Legitimacy of the Modern
Age.
c. Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Scheibe, p. 526. In translating passages from Dichtung und Wahrheit
in the following chapters, I have made considerable use ofJohn Oxenford's translation (Boston,
1883; rptd. New York: Horizon Press, 1969), but the translations here are basically my own.
1
"Priming Powder for an
Explosion"
Glaub unsereinem: dieses Ganze

ist nur fur einen Gott gemacht!
- Mephistopheles to Faust [Faust I, lines 1 780 -1 781]
[Trust one like me: This whole was made only for a God!]
Goethe took the scanty outline of the plot for his "Prometheus" ode
and for his fragment of a drama from a mythological lexicon, whereas
his first contact with the myth went back to one of the emblematic
representations that show the potter making men in his workshop. In
1830, when he admits the ode into the final edition of his works that
he supervised and assigns it the position of a third act in the planned
drama, he still relies, in his stage directions, on the same image as in
his earliest intuitive contact with the subject: "Prometheus in his work-
shop." After the ode, which has now become a monologue, all that
is added now is that Minerva appears, "introducing another process
of mediation." This latest hint of a concluding reconciliation went
unnoticed in the reception; it reflects the whole history of the poem.
Benjamin Hederich's Grundliches mythologisches Lexikon [Comprehen-
sive mythological lexicon], published in 1724, was accessible to Goethe
in the "most painstakingly revised, considerably expanded and im-
proved" edition done by Johann Joachim Schwabe, which had appeared
in 1 770 in Leipzig. While this work of imposing erudition was intended
to serve the "better comprehension of the fine arts and sciences not
404
Part IV
only for students but also for many artists and admirers of the ancient
works of art," it did not emphasize the aesthetic importance of the
figures and stories, as opposed to the historiographical clarification
and the moral treatment of myth. Hederich's premise was that" each
and every person, assuming that he does not want to circulate among
the entirely common rabble, needs to know something of this learned
gallantry." Almost a half-century later, though, Schwabe, the reviser,
already had to justify his revision of the book's style by saying that
Hederich "was sometimes in the mood to want to joke, for which the
mythological stories give plenty of opportunity. He commonly did it,
however, in a language that fell somewhat into the vulgar." In another
respect the reviser of the mythology detracts somewhat from its can-
onical rigor when he emphasizes - however much the ancients may
have held fast to the characteristic qualities of a story-the wideness
of the latitude they gave themselves: "the way in which, though, they
certainly did not let themselves be bound always to persist slavishly
with one construction."
Now, is what the ancients did, in making full use of their license,
once and for all excluded in the age of learning? Here lies the possibility
of a decisive impulse that the reading of the "Prometheus" article in
the Mythological Lexicon may have given the young Sturm und Drang
writer. For, while the article does end, like all the others, by adducing
allegorical elucidations of the myth, it does not do so without the
encouragement, astonishing after so much painful pedantic precision,
that is given to the reader in the very last sentence: "Everyone can
produce more such interpretations for himself" In the learned milieu
of the time, this license is simply unique. One can imagine how Goethe,
reaching this terminus, must have felt himself addressed.
To perceive this, the central point is enough that in connection with
the question of Prometheus's parentage Hederich makes no mention
of the version, from late antiquity, that makes Zeus his father. Instead,
he unambiguously associates Prometheus, as the son of Iapetus, with
the Titans. To transform the Prometheus story into a father-and-son
conflict here-especially when we must assume Goethe's ignorance
of the allegorical variant from late antiquity- the weightiest possible
infringement was required. The imprecision of the notice taken [of
Hederich's account] makes possible a reinterpretation that took on its
own truth in the pathos of Sturm und Drang. The reduced icon,
showing through, allows Goethe, by merely alluding to it, to bring
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Chapter 1
forward his own theme, as he writes to Roderer in 1 7 73: "I am working

up my situation into a play, in defiance of God and men." Another
letter already contains elements of the Prometheus scene: the sculptor
and his hut. "The gods have sent me a sculptor," he writes to Kestner
in mid-July 1 7 73, and the necessary means "to sink wells in the desert
and to build a hut."
Some things that had always belonged among the core constituents
of the story, such as the deceptive sacrifice and the theft of fire, are,
initially, entirely omitted by Goethe. a Hederich had harmonized these
two elements of the myth by suggesting that Zeus, who, as the highest
god, of course sees through the trick in the deceptive sacrifice, takes
away fire (which had after all already been used for sacrifices) from
Prometheus and his human beings as a punishment, "so that they
could not cook their portion of the meat." The theft of fire is not an
offense because it takes something from heaven and for the first time
gives it to human beings, but because it infringes and annuls an act
of punishment by Zeus. Hederich has his own logic; it must have
seemed intolerable to him that the highest of the gods originally and
for no reason did not wish man well. Admittedly, this version is in-
compatible with the feature that Hederich gives to the demiurgic
production of man, that man had been without understanding or
perception until Prometheus held the fire that he had stolen with the
help of Minerva to his breast, "which made man come alive." In that
case fire would have been stolen twice: once simply in order to bring
man to life, and again in order to preserve him in the life that his
maker had forfeited as a result of the deceptive sacrifice.
Probably this type of defiance, in the deceptive sacrifice and the
theft of fire, did not affect Goethe because his assumption of the role
of Prometheus only seemed justified by Prometheus's skillfulness: the
image-maker in his workshop, producing, as the antagonist of Zeus,
his own world of men. Not the cunning deceiver (in the sacrifice) and
thief of fire, who as such is dealing at most with side effects of his
creative activity. Goethe comprehended Prometheus the fire-bringer
for the first time in 1826, when he heard Haydn's Creation oratorio.
Haydn himself, to Carpani, had connected his musical picture of the
sunrise with the production of a spark from flint and steel in the hands
of the father of light. People found this image ignoble and childish,
Goethe writes in an article of Zelter's that he revised; but to him it
made "the age-old fable of Prometheus become clear, indeed I could
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Part IV
think of no image more sublime than th?-t of the all-powerful light in

the spark. "1 The point of Goethe's early reception of Prometheus lies
in the icon of the workshop, which could be related to the aesthetic
genius. The fact that he could read in Hederich that among the al-
legorical interpretations there was also one that made the story an
example of "the way God punishes those who, out of pride, mount
(as it were) into heaven, and try to deceive him" may perhaps have
formulated in advance the later difficulties of his identification with
Prometheus.
But when Goethe thinks that he can work up his own situation with
an eye on Prometheus's pottery workshop and his ceramic production
of men, the conflict does not in fact arise as a result of the exaggerated
gesture of defiance that would have been involved in relating to the
theft of fire as the central expression of mythical disobedience. The
fact that Goethe nevertheless plans on and accepts conflict, and conflict
that will result from the mere fabrication of images, has something
to do with the overcoming of his pietistic phase. What he now wants
to do, and does, appears to him as an act that runs counter to the
will of his divinity. He expressed this quite clearly: "It seems that God
does not want me to become a writer."2 That is only the short formula
for an opposition that he had described two months earlier to the
same correspondent: "My fiery head, my wit, my effort and my rea-
sonably well-founded hope to become, in time, a good writer are now,
to speak frankly, the most important obstacles to my whole change
of heart, and to true seriousness in responding more eagerly to the
beckonings of grace."3 That is the conflict. In the old language of
dogma, the conflict between nature and grace. To be able to do,
despite God, what he does not want, there is only one decisive plan:
to become a god himself That presupposes, however inexplicitly, a
polytheistic premise, the premise that the name of "god" takes an
indefinite article.
The location, in Goethe's biography, of his identification with Pro-
metheus - at the end of the conflict over whether to respond to the
beckonings of grace or to fulfill his hope of becoming a writer-
evidences a combination of image and consciousness of self that, ex-
tending across both affirmations and negations, still determined the
decision to have Pandora placed at the end of his Complete Works. b That
is, both the most violent and the most reconciliatory reinterpretation
of the myth that is contained in these works.
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Chapter 1
Before things had reached that point, there were other means of
digesting and dealing with the material, not least of all that of forgetting
it. One or two years after it came into existence, Goethe handed the
manuscript of the "Prometheus" ode over to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi,
evidently without keeping a copy. But ultimately it was not only Jacobi
who possessed the text, for he must have allowed copies of the original
to be made and waived any rights over them. Georg Forster quotes
from the ode a number of times before its publication; it is his most
frequent quotation from Goethe. But the way he takes up the poem
is quite unspecific and inadequate: "I feel that Goethe is right, with
his man who relies on himself."4 The manuscript of "Prometheus" is
mentioned once more to Jacobi. He had already returned the fragment
of the drama, on November 6, 1774: "Dear Goethe, here you have
your 'Prometheus' back, and with it my most sincere thanks. I can
scarcely tell you that this drama gave me pleasure, because it is im-
possible for me to tell you how much."5 When this return took place,
Goethe could already have forgotten the ode, which had not been
returned. In any case, half a year later he names the manuscripts of
Stella and Prometheus, but his request applies only to one of them:
" ... give me Stella back! If you knew how I love her. ... "6 This
placement of the accent suggests that Goethe was willing to forgo the
part of Prometheus [the part of the drama fragment: i.e., the ode] that
Jacobi still had. The fragment of the drama was to surface for the
first time in 1819, from the literary remains of Goethe's onetime Sturm
und Drang comrade, Lenz.
Thus what happens a decade later with the ode is not surprising.
There is nothing to indicate that, having come into the world as
privately as it could possibly have done, both as an utterance and as
something given away, it could have been intended to serve as the
"priming powder for an explosion" - the effect that Goethe was to
describe it as having had, in the retrospect of Dichtung und Wahrheit.
That is one of the disproportions of intention and effect that can be
peculiar to histories of influence [Wirkungsgeschichtenl and that often
remain inexplicable in them. For this one, at least an attempt at an
explanation shall be made.
In Jacobi's portfolio the ode was at most a speculative investment,
by no means an explosive material. He can-ied it with him on his
many journeys as evidence of intimacy with the famous man and as
a curiosity with which to enliven conversation. So it was also \vhen
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Part IV
he visited Lessing in Wolfenbiittel in July 1780, not long before the

latter's death. There is nothing that allows us to infer that Jacobi came
with the intention of provoking Lessing, or with the expectation of a
revelation. If that were the case, he would not have waited so long,
after the visit, to make a posthumous revelation out of it.
As for Jacobi's relationship with Goethe, there was, admittedly, an
old score to be settled there. The actions of the two of them mirror
one another. In 1779, Goethe, behind Jacobi's back, had subjected
the latter's Woldemar to a ritual of derision and execution in the park
of Ettersburg. Reviling the book, he had nailed a copy of it to an oak
tree. Jacobi, behind Goethe's back, made his "Prometheus" into the
bait of his metaphysical dialogue with Lessing, from whom he elicited
what no one had ever heard from him before. There is, however, a
clear difference: Goethe wanted to make a high-spirited and undisguised
spectacle of his treatment of the book, whose mere "odor" he could
not bear, whereas Jacobi would probably not have revealed Lessing's
secret, together with what had triggered his confession, if the latter's
friends, after his death, had not set about representing him "as an
apostle of Providence, as a martyr of pure devotion to God."7
In spite of the mirror-image relation between the actions, all the
indications are against Jacobi's having wanted to settle his old score
with Goethe. Goethe had in the meantime done much, though not
indeed everything, to disavow what Wieland was to call a "boyish
prank."8 A joke perpetrated by a thirty-year-old man who was named
a privy councilor the month after the ritual inflicted on Woldemar could
not be taken as altogether boyish. Two years later, in fact, he writes
to Lavater: "I cannot tell you anything about the story of Woldemar's
crucifixion - the facts are true - it is really a stale and out-of-date
piece of nonsense that you would be wisest to ignore .... You know
too well my rashly intoxicated anger and my mischievous acerbity,
which persecute what is half good and especially rage against the odor
of pretension. "9 The gossip network of the time functioned well. Jacobi
already knew of the event in September 1779, and had reproached
Goethe with it as "an insulting and disgraceful execution": "This report
has spread so widely that it finally had come to my ears as well. "10
The amazing thing about this friendship is that Jacobi will dedicate
the revised Woldemar to Goethe, in 1794, with the words: "How could
I have resisted you, you mighty one!"
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Chapter 1
He had already been Goethe's guest in Weimar in September 1784

for more than a week. And something remarkable emerges from this:
He must not have told Goethe about his visit to Lessing and the role
played there by the manuscript of the ode. For he had already written,
on November 4, 1783, the great letter to Mendelssohn with the detailed
description of his visit to Lessing and the effect of "Prometheus"-
the letter that he was to publish in 1785 with the Spinoza book. So C
when he was Goethe's guest he was already in the situation of standing

in need of proof, which soon forced him to conle out with the poem.
Nothing would have been more natural than to tell Goethe of this
effect of his "Prometheus," but there cannot have been anything that
Jacobi shrank from more.
How had matters reached this point? In March 1783, Jacobi had
learned from Elise Reimarus, the daughter of the secret founder of
the German Enlightenment, d that Moses Mendelssohn intended to
publish a memorial notice on "Lessing's character." Jacobi could be
certain that Mendelssohn would not fail to appeal to Lessing as a
witness on behalf of the metaphysical theism that he advocated. It is
no longer easy for us to clarify why Jacobi felt compelled to contradict
this. Did he merely want to honor the biographical truth, did he want
to deny Mendelssohn his impressive witness, or did he even want to
prevent the witness for the cause of theism (which \vas not a matter
of indifference to him, either) from, as it were, 'falling flat' befo,re the
eyes of the public, as a result of revelations from his literary remains
that might come from a third party? The warning that he con~eyed
to Elise Reimarus, and thus to Mendelssohn as well, contains a, clue
that supports, more than anything else, the theory that Jacobi fe:ared
that still other initiates into Lessing's true convictions could still be
alive and could reject Mendelssohn's public appeal to the deceased.
If his purpose \vas to protect Mendelssohn and his cause from this
exposure, it will not be possible to call his later wrath unjust. At all
events, he writes to Elise Reimarus: "Perhaps you know, and if you
do not know I confide it to you here under the rose of friendship,
that in his last days Lessing was a firm Spinozist." There follows' the
sentence that has to be considered in judging Jacobi's warning: "It is
possible that Lessing may have expressed these sentiments to a number
of people; in this case it would be necessary for Mendelssohn, in the
melTIorial to him that he wants to erect, either to avoid certain materials
entirely or at least to handle them with the greatest caution. "II Men-
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Part IV
delssohn does not accept the warning that is conveyed to him; he

insists on being told everything. This leads to Jacobi's comprehensive
answer of November 4, 1783, which he was to print two years later
in his Spinoza book. The information does not satisfy Mendelssohn.
He hardly hesitates before setting Jacobi down as the victim of a joke
by Lessing and, in his Morning Hours; or Lectures on the Existence ojGod,e
y
pursuing the thoroughgoing "vindication of Lessing." This controversy,

which it is difficult to bear vvith, does not need to be laid out here.
What is really important is to define more precisely the mythological
provoker of a mythical self-revelation.
We do not possess the letter with which Jacobi announced his visit
to Lessing and made known to him the subjects of his curiosity. Lessing,
in his answering letter of June 13, 1780, puts such pedantry in its
place, a little: "Our conversations would no doubt have taken place
of their own accord. But it was nevertheless good to give me an
indication of what we could best take as our point of departure. "12
Still, Lessing looks forward to the visit "with great eagerness." From
the list of subjects, he mentions only that in the meantime he has
looked into the continuation of Woldemar. Jacobi will later say to Men-
delssohn, about his lost letter, that in it he expressed his need "to
conjure up" in Lessing "the spirits of several wise men whom I could
not induce to express themselves on certain subjects. "13 The conjecture
that Jacobi proposed to Lessing a conversation about the seventy-third
section of the Education oj the Human Race remains speculation, which
seeks a point of contact for "Spinozism" that would not require crediting
Goethe's "Prometheus" with the power to evoke it.
A not uninstructive indicator of the constellations that are involved
here is Goethe's plan-which was formed too late-to visit Lessing.
Five days after the latter's death, Goethe writes to Charlotte von Stein
that he had just been occupied with this intention when the news of
Lessing's death arrived. 14 For a man who did not disregard omens,
that could hardly be a matter of indifference, especially since he had
avoided the meeting [with Lessing] in Leipzig in May 1768. If one may
believe Christian Felix Weisse, it was "by a mere accident" that Goethe
escaped one of Lessing's irate critical attacks. 15
When Jacobi arrives in Wolfenbiittel on July 5, 1780, there is con-
versation on that very day about "people-moral and amoral, about
atheists, deists, and Christians." The next morning Lessing pays Jacobi
a visit in his room, and since Jacobi has not yet finished with his
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Chapter 1
morning's correspondence, he passes his visitor some material from

his portfolio with which to pass the time. It was not immediately the
most interesting item he had there, since in returning it Lessing asks
whether there isn't something more to read. Since Jacobi is already
beginning to seal his letters, there is only time left for a poem-and
he proffers Lessing Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, not without the chal-
lenging remark: "You have caused so much annoyance [A~gernisl, now
you may be annoyed [or "scandalized": A·rgernis nehmenl yourself for
once." So there was, on Jacobi's side, a hesitation that he can hardly
have invented, and then a tentative offer of intimacy, of the disclosure
of forbidden things. When Lessing has read the poem he says that
he is not scandalized, because he has already known that "firsthand
for a long time." Jacobi misunderstands this formulation and supposes
that Lessing is already acquainted with the poem. But he has never
read it before and means "firsthand" in an entirely different sense:
"The point of view that the poem represents is my own point of
view .... The orthodox concepts of the divinity are_ no longer for me;
I cannot bear them." This is the transition to his admission of radical
heterodoxy, such as is not, admittedly, declared as dogma in Goethe's
poem, but is expressed, by the poem's attitude or intention, as a frame
of mind. "This poem points in that direction too; and I must confess
that it pleases me very much." It is Jacobi who first utters the name
of Spinoza, with whom he conjectures that Lessing agrees. It is, Jacobi
thinks, "a poor salvation that we find in his name!"
The conversation is interrupted; but Lessing, who has noticed his
guest's startled reaction, returns to the subject of his own accord the
following morning. Jacobi intensifies the situation by admitting that
he had in fact come to Lessing specifically in order to get "help from
him against Spinoza." So he had already been bound to be surprised,
"and I may well have turned red and paled, for I felt my confusion.
It was not fear. I admit that there was nothing I expected less than
to find, in you, a Spinozist or pantheist." Then Lessing hesitates no
longer and utters a sentence that Jacobi subsequently will make his
own, in its general sense, though admittedly reversing the direction
of the conclusions to be drawn from it: "There is no philosophy but
the philosophy of Spinoza" ["Es gibt keine andere Philosophie, als die
Philosophie des Spinoza"l. This is precisely what Jacobi will allege as
an objection to German Idealism: that it is the unfolding of the logical
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Part IV
consequences of all philosophy, and th~rein is necessarily and un-

avoidably Spinozism.
It is in the perspective of Lessing's utterance that one must also
understand the fact that in the first edition of the Spinoza letters, Jacobi
will even hold it against Kant- who endeavored so conscientiously to
avoid the logic of Spinozism-that the Transcendental Aesthetic of
the Critique ofPure Reason was written "entirely in the spirit ofSpinoza."
In the second edition this assertion is only verbally withdrawn: "That
the Kantian philosophy is not thereby accused of Spinozism goes without
saying for anyone who is versed in these matters." In the meantime,
of course, Jacobi had observed what could be produced with this term,
which denounced the substructure of the Enlightenment as an amalgam
of atheism and nature piety. Nevertheless, it was only in what is said
explicitly, not in its implications, that he wanted to except the Critique
of Pure Reason from the reproach of Spinozism. The fact that he had
not retracted anything in regard to Kant still emerges from a letter
of 1797, in which all that he is able to say in response to the charge
that he had "in reality invented" the Idealist system in his Spinoza is
that this is justified insofar as he had "shown that the Kantian phi-
losophy, in order to be consistent, had to hasten to this goal." He
"did not mind being praised" by the advocates of this logic-and
would keep his peace.
The use that Jacobi was to make of the catchword Spinozism, in
relation to Kant, at first gives the impression of dealing very frivolously
with a dangerous vocable. That would make room for the skeptical
suspicion that Jacobi had - as he himself admits having done at the
beginning of the conversation-put into Lessing's mouth at least the
unequivocal character of the confession of Spinozism. The core sentence
of all the utterances that are ascribed to Lessing by Jacobi-that there
is no other philosophy but that of Spinoza, so that all genuine philosophy
comes down to Spinozism- speaks against this. Jacobi will provide
evidence for this in his Spinoza, by drawing out the line of descent
beginning with Giordano Bruno: Pantheism is the unavoidable con-
sequence of combining the concept of creation with the attribute of
infinity. f Once this combination has been effected, there is no holding
back. It also remains a matter of complete indifference, then, whether
the concept of creation has been converted into the absolute egog or
remains implicit in the concept of the author of an infinite nature. In
this conversation with Lessing, Jacobi not only received a sensational
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Chapter 1
piece of intimate information but also obtained a criterion by which

to judge philosophy as a whole, and thus already an instrument for
his own challenge addressed to Idealism, a challenge that otherwise
he could not, at least, have reduced to a catchword so effectively.
When the situation is viewed in this way, Goethe was right to
speak-in describing the origin and effect of his "Prometheus," in the
fifteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit - of its having served as the
"priming powder for an explosion that revealed and brought into
discussion the most secret relations of estimable men: relations that,
unknown to those men themselves, slumber in an otherwise highly
enlightened society." And Goethe goes on to mention the most painful
consequence of this explosion for all those who were involved in it in
one way or another: "The schism was so violent that, together with
further incidents, it caused us the loss of one of our most estimable
men, Mendelssohn. "h
Did Goethe, one will have to ask, demonize the scene in Wolfenbiittel
when he looked back on it much later, so as to give his "Prometheus,"
the ode that he had already forgotten at the time, an epoch-making
im portance in relation to the end of the Enlightenement? Surely not,
if one attends to what Elise Reimarus wrote to Jacobi as early as
October 24, 1785, on receiving his Spinoza: "Whether or not I was
led by bias, I was terrified when I saw our Lessing exposed in such
a way before a world that does not understand him, cannot judge
him, and does not deserve to see him without a veil. "16 What Jacobi
had revealed was "an important detail from an intimate conversation,
from one of those little facetious speeches that one permits oneself
only in the presence of the confidants of one's soul and one's mind
and that, outside this narrow circle, are immediately transformed into
blasphemies." She had not, she says, been able to receive Jacobi's
work with as much pleasure as it deserved, and she would only be
able to do so if he could persuade her "that its consequences will not
be as bad as my presentiment makes them." Elise Reimarus explicitly
does not exclude "the poem" when she speaks of what- no doubt
following the example of her father's Schutzschrifti-should forever
remain accessible "only to Lessing's most intimate friends or to the
strongest among the people." When she imagines that the seekers
after the truth and friends of Lessing could fall, as a result of this
"contest [Wettstreit] about the truth," into a "personal dispute" [Pri-
vatstreit] in which "only the enemies of Lessing and of the truth \yill
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Part IV
be victorious," she sinks into melancholy worry: "0 dear Jacobi, I

shudder at the thought! Never, never let it come to that!"
Lessing's friend Elise, the trustee of the greatest inheritance of the
German Enlightenment, had not diagnosed the decline of the Enlight-
enment for the first time from the consequences ofJacobi's indiscretion.
She had already called out to Lessing before his death, as she writes
to the Copenhagen jurist August Hennings a few days after it, as often
as she could, her diagnosis regarding the century's rationality: "There
must continue to be darkness!"l7 This expression of terrible resignation
also stands behind the letter with which she responds to Jacobi's
sending his Spinoza to her. There is no talk of external interference
with the accomplishment of reason, of the recurrence of dark powers,
of Romantic conspiracies-instead, it is a lesson resulting from the
Wolfenbiittel incident itself that reason, in its execution, terminates
in an absolutism of identity that makes all other absolutisms
indistinguishable.
To say that Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, extending across the decade
in which it was forgotten, was the connecting link between Sturm und
Drang's defiance of the gods and Romanticism's transcendental identity
with God is not to establish a historical causality. The poem does not
generate something; it brings it to light - it triggers the confession of
the final balance of a life. One must look very closely at the way
Goethe describes the effect of his poem. In Dichtung und Wahrheit he
presupposes, as a fact, what underlies his coordination of the ode with
the fragment of a drama in the final authorized edition of his works,
of 1830: that the poem had been foreseen, as a monologue, in the
plan of the drama. That cannot be correct, if only for the reason that
there is an identity of text, amounting to almost four lines, between
the two. In fact the reverse had occurred: The fragment of a drama
had only absorbed the ode a half-year after the latter caIne into
existence. But its ex post facto integration gives the early Prometheus
complex the unity of a conception that is formed all in one moment,
the kind of unity that suits Goethe's self-interpretation in his life story.
The poem can then represent the totality of his trying on of "the old
Titanic garments," whose style is expressed in the formula according
to which he had begun, "without further reflection, to write a play."
As the poet looks at the effect of his work, it is important that he
himself had experienced this effect as the concentrated evidence of a
single conception. The reception of myth gives itself mythical features:
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Chapter 1
Genetic regroupings, in such a process, are unsuited to what, for the

poet's consciousness of himself, had possessed pure instantaneousness.
In his retrospective view, what Goethe presents as the monologue
from that "singular composition" of his self-comprehension in terms
of Prometheus became important, as a poem, "in German literature
because it induced Lessing to declare himself, regarding certain weighty
matters of thought and feeling, to Jacobi."j What aspect of the poem
could have become the specific element that "induced" this, Goethe
does not say. In this regard the metaphor of the "priming powder
for an explosion" also yields, as a clue, only the fact that it must have
been, in any case, more than the mere spark that sets off the explosion,
but less than the detonating charge. The expression seems to have
been chosen with some care, in order to assert something intermediate,
and not without vagueness, between the poem's having contained the
substance of the dispute over Lessing's memory and its having merely
triggered it. Why, then, the metaphorical violence of an "explosion"?
Because there was something to be uncovered.
Goethe offers, for what came to light then, the strongly worded
formulation that it had involved "the most secret relations of estimable
men." Now, estimable men may at any time have secret relations of
whatever kind-the relations that this poem "brought into discussion"
had the peculiarity that they had remained "unknown to those men
themselves." But still more: The final and decisive intensifying point,
which was bound to give the event the character of an explosion, was
that those circumstances, withdrawn from consciousness, "slumbered
in an otherwise highly enlightened society." In a society, that is, in
which the process of reason had been regarded as already successful,
and, what is more, among the people who had initiated and pushed
forward the process. What Goethe touches on metaphorically in this
way is his experiment, undertaken unwillingly and with evident dread,
with the failure of the Enlightenment. In words that do not explicitly
refer to the beginnings of Romanticism, he describes the effect of the
mythical poem as the emergence of a background [Untergrund] that
was unknown to the rationality of the century and to the intentions
of its most distinguished representatives, and unexpected by theln.
Seen in retrospect, what he later identified as the central myth of his
form of existence is coordinated specifically and precisely with such
an event.
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Part IV
So it is not unimportant that Goethe hardly hesitates to give the

poem a share even in the dispute's tragic denouement, which rumor
had turned into its consequence: "The schism was so violent that,
together with further incidents, it caused us the loss of one of our
most estimable men, Mendelssohn." That Goethe was not entirely
averse to this type of exaggeration is shown by his much later remark
to Knebel, regarding Stolberg's death, on December 29, 1819, that
the latter had been bound to "suffer fatally" as a result of Voss's
invective. k Of course this also belongs in a fundamental pattern of
crediting spiritual expressions with the greatest possible effect. Death
is no longer seen as testimony to the truth, but it is still seen as
testimony to the effect of intellectual action.
What is the source of the finding that Mendelssohn's death had
something to do with the controversy about Lessing's final truth? It
was the Enlightenment critic [Aujklarer] Johann Jakob Engel who, in
his foreword to the posthumous edition of Mendelssohn's last polemic
on this subject, had made the categorical statement: "The most im-
mediate occasion of the death that is so justly and so universally
regretted here was just what occasioned this composition. "18
Here, the process of deformation in the direction of pregnance was
at work. The report of the doctor (and student of Kant) Marcus Herz,
which Engel reproduces, contains only the finding of a very indirect
and incidental causal connection to the dispute with Jacobi: The sick
man had told him that he had caught cold while bringing his pamphlet
against Jacobi to the printer, Voss. The doctor concludes with the
statement: "His death was of the kind so uncommon in nature, an
apoplexy due to weakness." So this was already, in 1786, in the hands
of everyone who was at all interested in the dispute. But what more
palpable way of grasping the still undefined 'significance' of what had
come together- in such short span of months - as a potential for new
developments, than willingly to enter into a coincidence of events that
set before the onlooker the victim of those developments.
This victim himself had certainly understood least of all what it was
that could take on the intensity of an "explosion." Otherwise, Men-
delssohn would not have been able so casually to venture, as a way
of protecting Lessing's memory, to deny the seriousness of the scene
in Wolfenbiittel. He suggested that Jacobi had been subjected to a
"quantity of clever notions, with which our Lessing meant to entertain
417
Chapter 1
you, and regarding which it is difficult to say whether they are meant
as teasing or as philosophy. He had the habit, when he was in the
mood, of coupling together the most heterogeneous ideas imaginable,
in order to see what kind of offspring they would produce. . . . But
most of them were, admittedly, just unusual whims, which were never-
theless entertaining enough over a cup of coffee." 19
It was not only Mendelssohn's apologetics that pictured Jacobi as
the victim of "teasing" by Lessing. There were other shrewd contem-
poraries who also, from a greater distance, considered the scene in
Wolfenbuttel to have been a "sham" [gestellt]. Thus, between two other
proven Enlightenment critics, the Gottingen professor Abraham Got-
thelf Kastner and Friedrich Nicolai: "Someone should after all tell Mr.
Jacobi in print that Lessing made a fool of him. Everyone who knew
Lessing will confirm this. "20 In fact, Nicolai's Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek
[Universal German Library, a literary periodical] discussed the event for
almost seventy pages and registered doubt regarding the logic of the
conversation reported by Jacobi, and specifically, in fact, in relation
to the part that the "Prometheus" ode was supposed to have played:
"We must admit that to us the passage from the poem to Spinozism
appears so sudden that one is almost inclined to say that Lessing
created the occasion for effecting his philosophical confession of faith. "21
Another solution to the Wolfenbuttel puzzle had been prepared, un-
knowingly, as early as 1 783, by Friedrich Leopold Stolberg in a satirical
poem entitled "Die Dichterlinge" [The would-be poets], when he con-
nected Lessing's inclination to drowsiness, in his last years, to the visit
of a poetical youth, at which Lessing, awakening, feigned applause of
the poem that had just been read. 22 True, Stolberg did not yet know
anything about "Prometheus," but it was inevitable that Jacobi's account
should make people think of Stolberg's lines: "Zu Lessing kam ein
Jungling, las ihm vor, / Und schlaferte ihn ein ... " [A yout~ came to
Lessing, read aloud to him, / and put him to sleep ... ]. That is also
connected to the challenge that had finally put Jacobi in the situation
of needing proof, and obliged him to come forth wit h everything that
he could produce to bolster his account.
I cannot follow the historian of the "pantheism dispute," Heinrich
Scholz, when he sees in Mendelssohn the "more practiced" interpreter
of the dialogue situation between Lessing and Jacobi. True, Men-
delssohn knew Lessing's predilection for dialectical experin1ent, but
he entirely misjudged the possibility of his friend's being affected by
the "Prometheus" poem. The precondition of such an effect, "taking
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Part IV
pleasure in bad verses, which is so unnatural to a Lessing," could not,

Mendelssohn says, seriously be imputed to him. Mendelssohn is fully
satisfied to dismiss Jacobi's entire report as a product of his failure to
appreciate the ironical exchange of positions. The report's lack of
aesthetic credibility is supposed to reveal its lack of intellectual cred-
ibility: "Could Lessing forget himself so much in candidly confiding
in a friend? And finally [look at] his judgment of the 'Prometheus'
poem that Jacobi put in hands-which he certainly cannot have given
him on account of its excellence, but rather on account of its adven-
turous contents-and which Lessing thought so good. Poor critic! How
you must have fallen, to seriously think this paltry stuff good!' '23
Here it is not unnatural to go on to ridicule the delicate way in
which Jacobi had handled Goethe's ode. He had added it to his Spinoza
book on two unnumbered, loose pages, and justified this procedure,
in a footnote, with a reference to the epidemic of atheism represented
by Hume, Diderot, Holbach, and the translations of Lucian. Only the
circumstance that the poem "could hardly be dispensed with here, as
evidence, " had enabled him to overcome his hesitation about bringing
it out of oblivion and putting it before the public. It was infamous to
present the poem both as deserving to be forgotten and as open to
suspicion, rather than appending it to the text "quite innocently and
without further ado." Instead there was this demonstrative caution,
as though with the subject of a conspiracy, which made Jacobi add
to the book yet another insertion-designated as a "notice"-on a
special page, announcing that the poem "Prometheus" had been
printed separately "so that anyone who would rather not have it in
his copy need not have it there." And there was a further consideration
that had caused him to adopt this course: "It is not at all impossible
that, in one place or another, my book might be confiscated on account
of this 'Prometheus.' I hope that in such a place people will be satisfied
merely to remove the culpable page." Now Jacobi has grasped the
true value of his "speculative investment." And he is enjoying it to
the full.
Here was an opportunity for the gentle Mendelssohn to take the
offensive: "Herr Jacobi had misgivings about having these verses printed
with his other material without taking protective measures, so he
inserted an immaculate little page ,vhich readers with tender consci-
ences can have sewn in in place of the seductive verses. I fancy that
Lessing would have had to find the warning more pernicious than the
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Chapter 1
poison. One who can lose his religion as a result of bad verses must
certainly have little to lose." So because he thinks that Lessing would
have had to think the ode bad, and for that reason (if for no other)
could only have addressed it ironically, Mendelssohn does not take
into account the risk involved in his mixing of aesthetics and philosophy
of religion. If it was impossible for bad verses to be dangerous to
religion, then a mistake about their quality or about Lessing's taste
inevitably had to undermine such argumentation.
Thus, in his retort "Against Mendelssohn's Accusations," Jacobi did
confirm Lessing's "liking for the bad verses" as, though possibly re-
grettable from an aesthetic point of view, incontrovertible. In the
language of a witness before a tribunal, Jacobi writes, "I declare that
Lessing more than once not only considered bad verses good but
repeatedly asked for them, called them poems,! praised the poems-
and even admired them." Fearless of Mendelssohn's verdict, Jacobi
goes so far as to give Lessing's aesthetic appreciation of the "Pro-
metheus" ode precedence over the Spinozism he had supposedly found
in it. During their last farewell in Halberstadt in the middle of August
1780, he says, Lessing returned to the subject of Goethe's ode once
again: " ... at breakfast, when the talk turned to verses that were not
bad, Lessing asked me for 'Prometheus' once again, and praised and
expressed admiration for-the genuine, living spirit of antiquity, in
form and content, contained in it anew. "24
This last utterance of Lessing's with regard to "Prometheus" elu-
cidates, in a hitherto unnoticed way, what he could have meant, in
their first meeting, by the statement that he "had already known that
firsthand for a long time." Jacobi interprets the remark as relating to
Spinoza. This misunderstanding persists, as a premise of the conver-
sation; but the last utterance puts it beyond doubt that Lessing must
have meant the original source in antiquity, Aeschylus's tragedy. So
what he notices or pays attention to is not the clothing of the self-
consciousness of Sturm und Drang in the "old Titanic dress" but rather
the fundamental atmosphere of ancient tragedy. When Jacobi offers
the rubric of "Spinoza," this does not, after all, lie entirely outside
that primary connection for the philosophical tradition, because what
polytheism and pantheism, Epicureanism and Spinozism, ultimately
had in common had always been seen as their denial of divine care
for man. Goethe's ode also fits into this overall category. God's lack
of concern for man is the premise of the creative poet's self-empow-
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Part IV
erment and self-validation. Thus Spinoza was one possible rubric,

though not the compelling one, for the content of the poem.
Finally, there was still another factor that could make Jacobi believe
in the appropriateness of his interpretation: He had had a comparable
confessional experience with Goethe at the time of the origin of the
"Prometheus" ode-in the first hour, in fact, of their friendship. Jacobi
wrote to Goethe about this-certainly not without having to be pre-
pared for contradiction-much later, when he was anticipating the
third part of Dichtung und Wahrheit and had to anticipate his own
appearance there: "I hope that in this epoch you do not forget the
Jabachs' house, the castle at Bensberg, and the arbor in which you
talked to me, so memorably, about Spinoza.... What hours those
were! What days! -At midnight you sought me out, in spite of the
dark-it was as though my soul were reborn. From that time onward
I could not let you go. "25 Spinoza in the jasmine arbor-certainly not
as a secret disclosure, but still an enthusiastic confiding-that is Jacobi's
prototype for the mise en scene of his meeting with Lessing, and at the
same time a guiding experience behind his hermeneutic imputation
of "Prometheus" to Spinoza.
Jacobi had believed that the friendship that had begun in this way
must finally, especially after the incident at Ettersburg was gotten
over, be fulfilled in a community of conviction and of thought, whereas
Goethe coolly excluded this possibility: " ... we liked each other, without
understanding one another. I no longer comprehended the language
of his philosophy.... We never exchanged a friendly word about our
later labors. "26 Jacobi may have wanted to gain by force what was
denied to him in this way. So he did something of a magical character:
He tried to repeat the early scene of intimacy with Goethe in the
jasmine arbor, just as he had already 'applied' it to the meeting with
Lessing.
Varnhagen von Ense tells us that Jacobi visited Goethe in 1805 as
he was passing through Weimar, and called up and discussed many
a topic in the old atmosphere of intimacy. "But when they were left
alone, Jacobi came out with the confidential inquiry, wouldn't Goethe
finally tell him now candidly, between the two of them, what he had
really meant with his Eugenie (Sc. in the Naliirliche Tochler). To Goethe,
as he himself later admitted, it was as though someone had poured
a bucket of cold water over him; he suddenly saw a gulf that could
never be filled between himself and Jacobi, an abyss of eternal mis-
421
Chapter 1
understanding- and besides, the desire was so foolish and ridiculous.

But he pulled himself together and, just so as to get free of his friend
and of the evening lightly, he said propitiatingly, 'Dear Jacobi, let us
not go into that. It would lead us too far for today.' "27 So we have
three somewhat comparable situations, in which Jacobi's need for
intimate confessions, for personal revelations, is unmistakable. He was
a man who knew how to put his finger on sore points. How could he
have been in a position to suspect that any inquiry about Eugenie, in
The Natural Daughter, inexplicably disconcerted Goethe? Despite the
fact that he had let so many "private matters, secrets, unexpressed
things," reverberate in this drama, and although he spoke of none of
his characters as he spoke, in this case, of his "beloved Eugenie"?28,m
Must we not assume that he kept his secret, with a prudent refusal,
because he remembered how Jacobi had dealt with Lessing?
When Goethe, in 1820, writes an autobiographical note about the
estrangement between Voss and Stolberg, who had been friends from
their youth, the nature of his own relationship to Jacobi dawns on
him. Voss had blamed Stolberg for concealing from him his true
conviction, his intention of converting. Goethe, however, thinks that
it is a case of concealing something that should not have been declared
and that, when it was declared nevertheless, drove the most sensible
and steadiest men to desperation. As he was writing this down, Jacobi's
indiscretion must have become present to his mind. 'Just remember
the unfortunate disclosure, by Friedrich Jacobi, of Lessing's secret
disposition to Spinozism, as a result of which Mendelssohn literally
caught his death." Now that is somewhat more literal, even, than the
statement in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Once again we see how firmly
Goethe was convinced of the truth of Lessing's Spinozistic revelation
and of what Jacobi had reported about it. "Ho\v hard it was for his
friends in Berlin, who thought they were so intimately intertwined
with Lessing, to have to discover all at once that all his life he had
concealed a deep contradiction from them. "2!)
Does the rejection of Jacobi's importunity mean that in the end
Goethe saw his "Prometheus" as having less of a role in Lessing's
self-exposure than Lessing's visitor in Wolfenbiittel? That does not
harmonize with the importance that Goethe assigned to his dealings
with Prometheus. That he is supposed to have forgotten the ode is
itself an improbable construction. He had the extraordinary faculty
of being able to quote poems - his own or others' - that he had once
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Part IV
read or written, even after half a century:30 The fact that he included
the ode in the editions of his works published from 1 790 on is evidence
of a change; with the ex post facto blessing given to Jacobi's unau-
thorized action (in which, however, his name had been kept secret),
he reconciled himself to the inevitable. When the copy of the fragment
of a drama surfaced again in Lenz's literary remains, he wrote in
warning to ZeIter (from whom he does not seem to expect any rec-
ollection of Mendelssohn's end, although the composer had passed
his life in Berlin): "It is peculiar enough that that Prometheus, which I
myself had given up and forgotten, should reappear just now. The
well-known monologue, which is included ',among my poems, was
supposed to open the third act. You probably don't remember that
the good Mendelssohn died of the effects of a hasty publication of the
same. Don't let the manuscript become too public, so that it won't
appear in print. "31 Thus the year 1820 brought together, once again,
the early Prometheus material and (with the Voss-Stolberg affair) the
association with Jacobi's exposure of Lessing.
The apprehension that Goethe now connects with the publication
of the youthful work no longer has anything to do, in its content, with
what had become operative, four decades earlier, in connection with
Lessing. The possible explosions are of a different kind; only the
"priming powder" remains the same. Goethe goes on to this in his
letter to Zeiter: "It would come quite opportunely as a gospel for our
revolutionary youth, and the High Commissions at Berlin and Mainz
might take a punitive view of my young man's whims." The metaphor
that he had already chosen, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, for the operation
of the ode continues to suggest itself. It has apparently been developed
further by more intimate acquaintance with the myth, inasmuch as
the transportation of the fire that Prometheus stole in the hollow stalk
of a giant fennel is now able to typify something about the long
concealment of the dangerous substance: "It is remarkable, though,
that this stubborn fire has already smoldered on for fifty years under
poetic ashes until finally it threatens, taking hold of truly flammable
materials, to break forth in destructive flames."
But what is established, above all, in this late remark is the absence
of any unequivocal coordination of the mythical configuration with a
specific system of dogma. The fascination, and the risk that goes with
it, consisted precisely in the ambiguity of the configuration's inter-
pretation and of its capacity to serve as an answer, which seemed to
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Chapter 1
offer nothing and to demand everything. The catchword of Spinozism

had been no more adequate to the Prometheus story than that of the
revolution for which it could have become the "gospel" was now.
The mythical pattern demonstrates its evidentness through repetition.
Repetition lies between ritual and parody. Thus the wittiest contem-
porary [of the events] could not resist reenacting Jacobi's sounding out
of Lessing. Lichtenberg-who else could it have been?-staged the
Wolfenbiittel scene in the form of parody. Not by accident, he did so
with his antipode - with the representative of something that he not
only found most repugnant, but that appeared to him as the extreme
antithesis of the Enlightenment: with the author of the Physiognomische
Fragmente [Fragments on physiognomy]. Johann Kaspar Lavater's ques-
tionable activity and influence are described (from a not entirely fa-
vorable perspective) by Karl August Battiger, the director of the
GYlnnasium in Weimar and a person to whom the venerators of
Goethe do not listen with pleasure: "During the 'genius' period anyone
who did not want to trample on order and decorum was called a
philistine [SpiessburgerJ. Everyone was silhouetted and submitted to the
judgment of Lavater, who issued the most impudent verdicts and
dismissed the most upright people as belonging among the thieves
on Golgotha. Altogether, Lavater had a manifold influence on the
'genius' period here. "32 This is the man whose visit, contrary to all
probability and discretion, Lichtenberg receives in 1786, as he describes
on July 3 to the secretary for war in Hanover, Johann Daniel Ramberg.
If the Fragments on Physiognomy embodied everything that was re-
pugnant to Lichtenberg, it is all the more surprising when he says of
Lavater that he cannot "describe sufficiently how good this man is."
He means everything honestly, and if he deceives, then he is "a
deceived deceiver." He begs the recipient of his letter to use the utmost
discretion, because he knows that people "often make the most in-
famous use" of such things. This is, it is true, an allusion to the
consequences of the scene in Wolfenbiittel, but with reversed roles,
in that here the one who 'confesses' himself attends to the dissemination
of his 'revelation.'
Lichtenberg immediately guides his conversation with Lavater to
the subject of Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Jacobi, and to Spinozism. It
is a determined provocation. To be sure, he does not, like Lessing,
confess his own, present Spinozism, but rather proclaims Spinozism
as a mode of thought of times to come, as the ultimate consequence
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Part IV
of the research into nature in which he himself is a participant. The

long-term character of the perspective is ironical; it is founded on the
idea that through the progress of physics the scope for the assumption
of occult powers and spiritual substances becomes ever narrower. "The
only ghost that we still recognized was the one that haunts our body
and brings about effects that we explained, precisely, by a ghost, just
as the peasant explained the knocking in his bedroom - because he,
in the latter case, just like us in the former, did not know its causes."
The dualism of body and soul, Lichtenberg said, rests only on a false
conception of matter as an inert substance. The process of theory will
overcome that metaphysical estrangement, from the side of physical
bodies, and will lead to a substantial monism. The upshot will be that
the investigation of nature, "continued for millenniums more, will
finally lead to Spinozism."
Lichtenberg's provocation slides off La vater, just as Lessing's slid
off Jacobi. Lavater answers, completely guilelessly, that what he has
just heard from Lichtenberg "he also believes." Lichtenberg confesses
to his visitor that he had not expected him to be so unbiased. But did
Lichtenberg understand his guest correctly? Did he not, for his part,
fall victim to an ambiguous assent? The interval of millenniums that
was granted for the final inescapability of Spinozism may have made
it easier for Lavater not to resist. In millenniums, one can lightheartedly
let worlds perish. The actual facts are probably more nearly reflected
in the conjecture that Lichtenberg's prophecy may have struck Lavater
as that of an entirely legitimate disaster that was in store for the
Enlightenment's dealings with science, as the result of their inner logic:
that reason would relapse into the myth it claimed to overcome.
This conjecture would accord with the sketch of Lavater that Goethe
once gave Charlotte von Stein: "He seems to me like a person who
explained to me in detail that the earth is not a precise sphere, but
is pressed in at the poles-who proved that most conclusively, and
convinced me that he possessed the newest, most detailed and most
correct concept of astronomy and the construction of the world; what
would we say, then, if such a person concluded by saying, 'Finally I
must still mention the main point, which is that this world, whose
shape we have most accurately demonstrated, rests on the back of a
tortoise, since otherwise it would fall into the abyss.' "33 At the time
when this character sketch was given, Lavater's influence on the Weimar
genius activity had already been broken.
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Chapter 1
Lichtenberg has a brief and impersonal encounter with Jacobi, too.

It clarifies, in the manner of a spotlight, the endangered situation of
the Enlightenment, of which the Spinozism dispute had been the most
trenchant indicator. The parody of the scene in Wolfenblittel is also
illuminated insofar as it, too, is characterized by the skepticism with
which Lichtenberg watches for signs of the success or failure of reason.
It seems as though in this case, as in the former one, he wants to test
the stability of the achievements of the Enlightenment.
At the beginning of 1793 an unusual comet appears. Lichtenberg
writes to Jacobi that he remembered the passage in Tacitus according
to which, in the popular view, a comet means a change of political
regime. Since political events of this type had coincided with the current
comet, in any other age the validity of the omen would have been
held to have been confirmed. The comet had appeared as the trial
of the French king neared its end, and had disappeared immediately
after his decapitation: "What would people not have made of this
phenomenon in earlier times?" Lichtenberg does not even regard his
own immunity to the singular coincidences between events in the
heavens and events on earth as a matter of course. The teaching
which he has received, but also the circumstance that he was born
just in Darmstadt and not in Munich or Paderbom, made him insen-
sitive. And as though this were the most extreme test of enlightenment,
he now names Jacobi himself as the test case. He has in fact, he says,
reached the point where he is able "to read the writings of the sage
of Pempelfort with delight." It is not only for himself but also for his
age that Lichtenberg draws the conclusion that the attention that is
not paid to omens in the heavens - to the comet in the case of the
French king and to a solar eclipse in the case of the English one-
confirms the influence of philosophy: "That is indeed very fine, and
a sign that the paper assignats of the philosophers are beginning to
rise in value. "34 As for Lessing more than a decade earlier, now for
Lichtenberg too, it is precisely what cannot be attacked and embar-
rassed by Jacobi that makes evident-just like the failure of the comet's
path to leave any trace in the public consciousness - the success of
philosophy.
It was not only in the retrospect of Dichtung und l¥ahrheit that.
Goethe - to come back to him - used the Spinoza dispute in dating
t he disaster that befell the Enlightenment. Months before he held in
his hands Jacobi's Spinoza, \vith the copy of his ode, he \vrote to Jacobi,
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Part IV
at the beginning of 1785, challengingly .and anxiously at the same

time: "I train myself on Spinoza, I read him and read him again, and
I look forward to the day when the battle will break out over his dead
body .... "35 In the autulnn of the same year, then, he has to write,
regarding his increased entanglement in the affair as a result ofJacobi's
reproducing another poem: 'Jacobi has played a mad trick on me.
In his conversation with Lessing, of course, my 'Prometheus' crops
up, and now that he is having his doctrine of divinity printed, he
includes the other poem, 'Edel sei der Mensch!' [Let man be noble],
with my name in front of it, so that everyone can see that 'Prometheus'
is by me. "36
Goethe had never once questioned Jacobi's right, in the situation
where he was in need of evidence, to print "Prometheus." What he
took offense at ,vas the questionable manner in which it was published
and in which the author was made known: "The best thing would
have been if you had simply had 'Prometheus' printed, without any
note and without the sheet, by which you provoke a confiscation
motivated by anxiety .... "37 Here, Goethe probably did not even know
that Jacobi had provided for the worst case as well. He could equip
his book with altered pages 11 and 12 as a substitute, on which the
risk was described in naked words, and at the same time excluded:
"This poem, which is directed, in very strong language, against any
Providence, cannot, for good reasons, be imparted here. "38
The sequence of events that, with the reference back to Jacobi's
exaggerated precautions, lies before us concluded has the quality of
myth. Everything is not only 'done up' in terms of significance, it is
experienced and seen in those terms. The increasing confirmations,
both real and only supposed, retroactively reinforce the profiles, the
contours. The most immediately striking thing is what one has to call
the causal disparities: Things that are supposed to have followed not
only one after another but one from another can only be viewed as
obeying the principium rationis insufficientis ['principle of insufficient rea-
son'J, which holds for relationships in which rhetoric operates. 39 Nor
can the engendering of significance as though it were made to order
be viewed in the light of the adage about small causes and great
effects-because the causes are, in their o,vn way, "great," as, for
example, "Prometheus."- The relation to images has its own regulative
principles. Goethe allows another person's prank to spring over into
his ovvn mode of vision. Initially, he almost allows the if not forgotten,
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Chapter 1
at any rate faded, Titanism to be forced upon him again, so as - as

he did in other instances with what was unavoidable- to assume It
as his own, to accept it as a contrasting element in his self-compre-
hension. He will not be able to thrust "Prometheus" away from himself
again, although this is not the only time that he is made uncomfortable
by recognizing his initial choice and not being able to leave it as it
was. What had been meant to be a figure of triumph and self-con-
firmation was not to remain that.
Translator's Notes
a. "Prometheus" "Prometheus"
Bedecke deinen Himmel, Zeus, Cover your heavens, Jove,

Mit Wolkendunst with misty clouds
Und iibe, dem Knaben gleich, and practice, like a boy
Der Disteln kopft, beheading thistles,
An Eichen dich und Bergeshohn; on oaks and mountain peaks!
Musst mir meine Erde My earth you must leave me
Ooch lassen stehn still standing,
Und meine Hiitte, die du nicht gebaut, and my cottage, which you did not build,
Und meinen Herd, and my hearth
Urn dessen Glut whose warmth
Ou mich beneidest. you envy me.
Ich kenne nichts Armeres I know nothing poorer
Unter der Sonn als euch, Gotter! under the sun than you gods!
lhr nahret kiimmerlich Wretchedly you nourish
Von Opfersteuern your majesty
Und Gebetshauch on sacrificial tolls
Eure Majestat and Aimsy prayers,
Und darbtet, waren and would starve if children
Nicht Kinder und Bettler and beggers were not
Hoffnungsvolle Toren. hopeful fools.
Oa ich ein Kind war, When I was a child,
Nicht wusste, wo aus noch ein, not knowing my way,
Kehrt ich mein verirrtes Auge I turned my erring eyes
Zur Sonne, als wenn driiber war sunward, as if above there were
Ein Ohr, zu horen meine Klage, an ear to hear my lamentation,
Ein Herz wie meins, a heart like mine
Sich des Bedrangten Zll erbannen. to care for the distressed.
Wer half mir Who helped me
Wider der Titanen Ubermut? against the Titans' wanton insolence?
Wer rettete vom Tode mich, Who l'escued me from death,
Von Sklaverei? from slavery?
Has du nicht alles selbst vollcndet, Have you not done all this yourself,
Heilig gliihend Herz? My holy glowing heart?
Und gliihtest jung und gut, And young and good, yOll glO\ved,
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Part IV
Betrogen, Rettungsdank betrayt;d, with thanks for rescue

Dem Schlafenden da droben? To him who slept above.
Ich dich ehren? Worur? I honor you? For what?
Hast du die Schmerzen gelindert Have you ever eased the suffering
Je des Beladenen? of the oppressed?
Hast du die Tranen gestillet Have you ever stilled the tears
Je des Geangsteten? of the frightened?
Hat nicht mich zum Manne geschmiedet Was I not welded to manhood
Die allmachtige Zeit by almighty Time
Und das ewige Schicksal, and eternal Fate,
Meine Herrn und deine? my masters and yours?
Wahntest du etwa, Did you fancy perchance
Ich sollte das Leben hassen, that I should hate life
In Wiisten fliehen, and fly to the desert
Weil nicht aile because not all
Bliitentraume reiften? my blossom dreams ripened?
Hier sitz ich, forme Menschen Here I sit, forming men
Nach meinem Bilde, in my own image,
Ein Geschlecht, das mir gleich sei, a race to be like me,
Zu leiden, zu weinen, to suffer, to weep,
Zu geniessen und zu freuen sich, to delight and to rejoice,
Und dein nicht zu achten, and to defy you,
Wie ich! as I do.
Translation by Walter Kaufmann, in Twenty German Poets (New York: Random House, 1962),
pp. 9-11.
b. Pandora is the last text in the final volume (vol. 40) of non-posthumous works in the complete
edition that was begun in the last decade of Goethe's life: Goethe5 Werke: VolLstandige Ausgabe
letzter Hand, 60 vols. (Stuttgart and Tiibingen: J. c. Cotta, 1827-1842).
c. F. H. Jacobi, Uber die Lehre des Spinozas, in Briefen an Herrn Moses Mendelssohn (Breslau, 1785).
d. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, author of the Apologie oder Schutzschrijt for die verniinJtigen Verehrer
Gottes, which was published in full only in 1972 (2 vols., Frankfurt: Insel).
e. Morgenstunden oder VorLesungen iiber das Dasein Gottes (Beriin, 1785).
( Unendlichkeit "unlimitedness." This combination is discussed, in connection with Giordano

Bruno, in the author's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983),
especially pp. 561-564.
g. Das absolute /ch, a phrase that is prominent in Fichte's Idealism.
h. Dichtung und Wahrheit, ed. Scheibe, p. 527.
i. The reference is to Reimanls's Apologie oder Schutzschrijt, which was unpublished (except for
the famous fragments published as "anonymous" by Lessing and known as the "Wolfenblittel
fragments") until 1972.
j. See note h.
429
Chapter 1
k. See the paragraph of this chapter related to note 29, for the story of Voss and Stolberg.
1. Ein Gedicht is also a term of (figurative) praise.
m. Some of the private associations, for Goethe, of his play Die Natiirliche Tochter (The natural
daughter) are discussed in the next chapter of this book, in the three paragraphs ending with
that related to note 23.
2
A Conflict between Gods
There is no way to talk to a Vulcanist.

-Goethe to his son, July 29, 1822
How was the Prometheus material able to develop, in Goethe's con-

sciousness, into a central configuration of his understanding of himself
and the world? Is it possible to grasp something of the disposition
that made this myth close to him throughout his life, a myth by which
he was stirred again and again, as he was comparably stirred only by
Faust? I want to try to exhibit some aspects of what one could also
call Goethe's affinity to this myth.
One will have to believe Bettina von Amim, even though she loved
to make up tales and was, even in her imagination, unscrupulously
self-centered, when she relates what she can hardly have made up:
that Goethe's mother told her how the six-year-old child was troubled,
after the earthquake in Lisbon in 1755, by the question of how the
event could be justified. His mother's statement sounds daring, but
is of great importance, when she says that the "revolutionary agitation
in connection with this earthquake appeared again in connection with
'Prometheus.' "I
Of course, here as elsewhere, the latency of violation of [the child's]
faith in the direction of the world [Weltsinn] can only be conjectured.
Nothing permits us to assume that the mother could perhaps have
inquired [about this] at the time of the first "Prometheus" plan. But
even as pure conjecture, it is, nevertheless, a sufficiently clear per-
431
Chapter 2
ception, if one wants to comprehend, as a determining power in

relation to what came later, the deep penetration of the "Prometheus"
indignation into the foundation of this life. Goethe himself told Riemer
in 1809 that as a six-year-old he had fallen to brooding and had not
understood why God could not at least have spared women and chil-
dren, in Lisbon, as he did in the Old Testament.
One must first of all examine more closely what the boy is supposed
to have said, in order to discover the specificity of the connection that
his mother detects. He was going home with his grandfather, from a
sermon, which may have unfolded the kind of theodicy that was
common after Leibniz in order to defend the wisdom and goodness
of the Creator in view of the catastrophe that had shocked the Con-
tinent. The father made inquiries aimed at determining what the boy
had understood of the sermon. The boy may have recounted what
belonged to the familiar repertoire of the popular intermediate realm
between theology and metaphysics, but what was astonishing was the
way he explained, pursuing his own, divergent argument, that things
might be much simpler, after all, than the preacher thought. Because
the God who had allowed the earthquake to happen \vould certainly
know that "bad fortune cannot harm the immortal soul." That is
astonishing because it takes up the problem from the point of view
of the inviolability of those affected by it, rather than leading to ac-
quiescence in the mysterious justice of God in action. One thinks
immediately of the lines of the "Prometheus" ode that begin with the
hyperbole: "Musst mir meine Erde / Doch lassen stehn ... " [My earth
you must leave me / still standing .. .]. This may be the point at which
his mother recognized the prototype of the thought contained in the
poetry.
The direction is fixed by the fact that the boy, no doubt in con-
tradiction to the preacher, thinks little of the question of ho\v God's
justice and goodness could be saved. What concenlS him is the other
question of what the God who sends or perrnits the earthquake cannot
do to or take from the man whom he strikes with it. As long as God's
morality may not be postulated-by virtue of the absolute validity of
practical reason-together with his existence, as it could be according
to Kant's second Critique, all questioning must circle around the limi-
tation of his power. This limitation could only be seen in the conditions
(disallowed by Kant's first Critique) of the substantiality of the subject.
432
Part IV
The old crown jewel of metaphysics, immortality, could also be seen

as a constant that could not be violated by any power.
What we have before us in this childhood scene is an episode from
the last act of the drama of the justifications of God, which Plato had
opened with the myth of the choice of fates by the souls and for which
Augustine provided the systematic construction when he invented
man's freedom solely for the purpose of exonerating God by making
man responsible for what was bad in the world. On this assumption
the bad (malum) that befalls man is only the equivalent that counter-
balances the wickedness (malum) that he commits. To be sure, the
freedom that is discovered in this way at the same time establishes
[the free agent's] inaccessibility by physical causality. In the last analysis
it renders [the free agent] untouchable by just those bad things in the
world for which it creates [him as] the bearer of responsibility. a That
is what the boy, Goethe, had arrived at: The bad things that are
integrated into wisdom and justice by theodicy do still affect man, but
they no longer affect him in his substance. This will still be the fun-
damental idea that determines the conclusion of Faust, when Meph-
istopheles-in spite of all the legality of having won the wager-has
to let Faust's immortal part escape him.
Whoever it may be who, in the case of the earthquake at Lisbon,
may perhaps not have meant men so well as they liked to believe,
he did not reach what was inextinguishably their own. Now one will
hardly be able to assert that Goethe allowed himself to be dissuaded
from the idea of man's substantial inviolability by Kant's Paralogisms. b
As an old man he will still say that it is natural to him to think of
death in this way: "This thought does not disturb me at all, because
I have the firm conviction that our spirit is a being that is entirely
indestructible by nature .... "2 But this is not, after all, the only solution,
and is probably also too abstract a solution, for concern about in-
violability by a too powerful wilL Augustine's institution of the concept
of freedom had loaded the responsibility for the world on guilty man
so as to overcome the threat, made manifest by Gnosticism, of the
bifurcation of the ground of existence into good and evil; everything
comforting in the idea that man could be saved, by a being who was
more friendly to him, from the afflictions of the world and from
entanglement in guilt under a law that could not be complied with,
was lost with the inexorability of the idea that the quality of the world
resulted entirely from man's freedom and from his primeval lapse.
433
Chapter 2
But in the precocious child Johann Wolfgang's theodicy, one can already
perceive the first step toward imagining man's rigid responsibility once
again as a mythical complication around man.
The six-year-old does not think strictly monotheistically when he
says that God will certainly "know" that man is immortal and that
his misfortunes consequently cannot ultimately get any hold on him.
That makes the state of affairs at least possible, as a limitation on
what God can lay his hands on, in which this man would not be a
creature of the same God who could press him so hard, in the world,
as he did in Lisbon. This would be a precondition of the awakening,
once Goethe had taken even the most cursory cognizance of the myth
of Prometheus, of anamnesis of his early idea of man's indestructibility.
The mythical imagination could make into man's supporter a different
god from the one who, while he was able to produce the terrors and
convulsions of nature, could not overthrow and destroy that imagination
itself. In this way the "Prometheus" ode could follow logically from
the boy's early idea, if the monotheistic rigorism of the classical theodicy
had already been, if not broken, at least weakened, there.
This construction of a bridge across a latency would, admittedly,
be too fragile, if Goethe himself had not brought out just this aspect
of his affinity to the Prometheus material in his retrospect written in
1813. It was "a beautiful thought, and well suited to poetry, to represent
men as created not by the supreme ruler of the world but by an
intermediate figure who, however, as a descendant of the oldest dy-
nasty, is worthy and important enough for this role ... ."c The ap-
pearance of Gnosticism, which is bound to arise whenever man's origin
is separated from that of the world, is avoided here not only by means
of the expression "intermediate figure" and by Goethe's abstaining
from any evaluation of the creator figures but also by means of the
undefined pluralism of the framework of dynasties and genealogy
with which the sketch is immediately surrounded. A path becomes
accessible, by which Goethe, the aesthetic polytheist, became just that
by impeding or vanquishing a dualistic metaphysician. This allows
him, in Dichtung und Wahrheit, to combine that fundamental thought,
beautiful and well suited to poetry, with the generalization " ... as,
indeed, Greek mythology in general presents an inexhaustible wealth
of divine and human symbols." At the same time that he is stressing
his involvement with the Prometheus material, in this way, Goethe
declares -speaking almost like a systern-builder (and it is not accidental
434
Part IV
that this is in a letter to Jacobi)-his adherence to a 'triple' theology:

"For myself, I carmot be satisfied, given the multiple tendencies of my
being, with one mode of thought; as a poet and artist I am a polytheist,
but as an investigator of nature I am a pantheist, and I am the one
just as firmly as the other. If I have need of a God for my personhood,
as a moral man, then that has already been taken care of, toO."3
After this glance at the six-year-old deformer of the theodicy that
was just then perishing together with Lisbon, another indirect document
of Goethe's childhood must be brought up, one that shows his father's
Latin student at vvork. In Frankfurt there is an exercise book that
belonged to the boy, which contains, together with other material,
translation exercises from German into Latin, including one dated
January 1757, of which the text to be translated had evidently been
composed by the father and dictated to the group of students that
met on Sundays in different parents' houses in succession. 4 For the
scene, a dialogue between father and son, unmistakably takes place
in the well-provided burgher's house on the Grosser Hirschgraben.
The father is going into the wine cellar, and the son asks whether
he may accompany him. First, in the interest of a little grammatical
nicety, he must say what it is that he proposes to do there. To get a
correct idea of the refilling of the loss from evaporation from the great
wine casks, the boy answers. The father, being no different from other
fathers, does not have confidence in such an educational purpose; he
suspects the presence of another purpose behind it. Then the son has
to adInit that he wants to see the cornerstone (lap idem fundamentalem)
of the house and the keystone (lapidem clausularem) of the cellar vault.
We do not learn whether such a desire to get to the bottom of things
still, or first of all, meets with the father's approval. In any case when
his son hesitates, shrinking from the darkness on the cellar steps, he
promises - in agreelnent with his epoch and its reliance on education-
speedy light: "descende mi fili provide et mox infra lucem invenies"
[go down carefully, my son, and soon, down below, you will find light],
the son translates. And in fact it does tum out, in this educational
inversion of the allegory of the cave, that a little light, through the
cellar opening, is enough to remove the mystery from the things in
the dark.
When the cornerstone and the keystone have been found, the father
invites the son to remember the ceremony in which he himself had
been allowed to lay the cornerstone. But the high point of the dialogue
435
Chapter 2
is the question about what he thinks, then, when he looks at the

cornerstone. In this dialogue, embellished elsewhere for the purposes
of the translation exercise, but scarcely invented, the father will have
been interested in reproducing the answer literally and bringing a little
reproof to bear. If that is so, then what we are dealing with here is
an earliest original fragment, which has been neglected in the editions
of Goethe's conversations.
The son's answer, as written down by the father, reads: "I think
and wish that it may not be displaced sooner than at the end of the
world."5 To the father, so much durability is too much to demand,
and with stylized discretion he restricts it: "We will leave that up to
God .... " We see from the continuation of the conversation that the
boy remains intent on the stability of the standing structure. Apparently
the wine cellar was only built under the house later, because the son
is surprised that they were still able to continue to live in the house
during its construction, in spite of the danger involved in excavating
under and propping up the house. Still characteristic of the economizing
householder father - we will soon meet him in the role of bookkeeper
for his son's aesthetic expenditures-is his admonition to the next
generation to make only moderate use, later on, of the old vintages,
so as to pass some of the bottles on to posterity as well.
The whole scene is almost a ceremony of initiation into bourgeois
stability. That becomes clearest of all at its conclusion: So that the son
should not go away unrewarded for his answers, the father hands
him, in the dark cellar, an unprepossessing piece of wood, which he
reveals to be a piece from the mast of the ship on which Columbus
discovered the New World. The son promises to preserve it.
It would perhaps be exaggerated hermeneutics to say that the eight-
year-old's intentness on the stability of the foundations of the house,
on the linkage of its duration with that of the world itself, as a whole,
still allows us to perceive the trauma with which, less than two years
earlier, the descriptions of the earthquake at Lisbon had affected the
child. But if one examines this life and its texture further, then the
child's attitude to the cornerstone and to the ground on which it rests
becomes the characteristic figuration of a subjective attitude toward
the world that, before the word was worn out, one would confidently
have called existential. More on that follows.
When Eckermann goes walking, on a beautiful fall day in 1823, on
the road toward Erfurt, he encounters an aged man \\'ho, as they
436
Part IV
converse, makes himself known as Goethe's former valet, Sutor. Eck-

ermann asks him for recollections of his twenty years of service. Once
Goether rang for him in the middle of the night, Sutor says, and when
he entered his chamber he had pushed the iron bed from the other
end of the room to the window and was examining the sky while
lying in the bed. Goethe asked him whether he had not noticed anything
in the sky, and when he answered in the negative, sent him for the
watchman in order to ask whether he had not seen anything. On his
return he had to tell his master, who still lay there examining the sky
without moving, that nothing had attracted the watchman's attention.
Then Goethe said to him: "Listen, we are at an important moment;
either we are having an earthquake right now, or we will have one."
Then he showed Sutor by what signs he arrived at this conclusion.
Since it was very cloudy and sultry, it cannot have been a matter of
observation of the stars. We are not told what Goethe had shown his
valet. But it must have convinced him, this time as on other occasions
too: He "took his word for it, because what he predicted was always
correct." The duke, too, and other people at court on the next day
had put faith in Goethe's observations. Some weeks later, then, the
news aITived that "during the same night, part of Messina had been
destroyed by an earthquake."6 What was recounted must, then, have
taken place in February 1783.
When Goethe noted laconically in his diary, on December 21, 1823,
in connection with Eckermann's account of his encounter with Sutor,
"Sutor's story [Tradition] of a phenomenon in the heavens," it is not
necessary to conclude from this that his own memory had not pre-
served, or even that it had never contained, anything about the tele-
pathic relation to the earthquake. Precisely if his memory had been
clear and significant, he would have neede~ '~nly an entry noting the
date and would otherwise have kept just as visibly silent as he char-
acteristically did in relation to 'significant' things. He did not at all
like reference to be made to his propensities for the ominous.
Some information on how it may really have been can be gained
from a letter to Frau von Stein of the sixth of April 1783, in which
he says: "Tonight I saw a northern light in the southeast. Hopefully
there has not been an earthquake again, because it is an unusual
phenomenon." This was not, at any rate, the fifth of February, and
during this night Goethe already knew of the destruction of Messina;
the word again, in connection with the earthquake (not with the phe-
437
Chapter 2
nomenon in the heavens), points to this. Does not the conjecture follow
that the connection between earthquakes and phenomena in the heav-
ens "vas first generated during this night? If a phenomenon in the
heavens had already been observed two months earlier, Goethe would
not have needed the argument that it was unusual. But, then, Sutor
was inclined, in his recollection, not to want to see the great man (as
he had become in the intervening time) cheated of his distinction as
the possessor of presentiments, a distinction that so well suited him
and his idea of the unity of nature, which encouraged one not to let
one extraordinary phenomenon be without reference to another. So
Goethe himself did not protest against the recollections that Eckermann
reported from Sutor - to him, too, such things seemed very natural.
Comparably telepathic, then, is the sensibility with which, two years
later, he perceived in the necklace affair the beginning of a break in
the political ground on which the condition of France, and thus of
Europe, rested. It is the year in which he learns for the first time of
the other shocks that his "Prometheus" caused to those estimable
men, of the violent "schism" [Riss, "fissure"] "in an otherwise highly
enlightened society," which seems to be only the pendant to the
"abyss" that had opened in the neighbor country-metaphors that
related to the ground that supports life in a world.
Concern about the ground under one's feet was not only a matter
of schisms and abysses; as the fear of losing the ground in the process
of exalting oneself to the stars, it was already expressed in "Grenzen
der Menschheit" [Human limitations (c. 1780)], which Erich Schmidt
described as a "cheerful parody of 'Prometheus,' " because Zeus has
become the holy Father, the ancient of days, who hurls beneficent
lightnings over the earth and inspires childlike awe in the hearts of
his creatures. There we find what has to be entitled a further piece
of 'work' on the Prometheus material: "Denn mit Gottern / SolI sich
nicht messen / Irgend ein Mensch" [For let no man measure himself
against gods]. The early Promethean attitude and the "Grenzen der
Menschheit," even though the latter comes only half a decade later,
represent [mutually exclusive] alternatives: One who wants to stand
firmly on the earth cannnot touch the stars with his head. The related
image of shipwreck appears, too: The ever-rolling stream on which
man drifts lifts him, with its wave, and lets him sink. The fact that
standing "Auf der Wohlgegrundeten / Dauernden Erde" rOn the finn-
established lasting earthl is not secure and unmolested-that is \\That
438
Part IV
costs Prometheus his great gesture. d On July 25, 1779, Goethe writes
in his diary that he begs the onlooking gods not to laugh at his "striving
and struggling and pains"-"At most, smile, and stand by me."
Goethe's partisanship in the contest between Neptunism and Vul-
canism lies on the same fundamental axis of alarms about the reliability
of the ground [we stand on], alarms that begin with the impression
made on the boy by the earthquake at Lisbon. This controversy had
issued from the Enlightenment's endeavor to free itself from the in-
junctions about the beginnings of the world that were laid down by
the biblical account of the Creation, and to seek out immanent formative
P9wers of nature, and especially of the earth's surface. The Bible had
established solid ground for man's life by means of the command, on
the second day of the Creation, that the firmament should be divided
from the waters. In contrast to that, the solution proposed by Vulcanism,
as the theory of the formative violence coming from within, seemed
almost pictorially to corroborate pure immanence. The earth gave
itself its definitive physiognomy. Even the most daring 'Enlighteners'
[A uJklfired still lacked an idea of the length of time that had to be
allowed for processes of sedimentation in order to make it possible
to ascribe to water a creative power that even merely approached
that of the earth. In its competition with the story of the Creation,
Vulcanism very quickly went beyond the bounds of its productivity
as a theory. In his first book, the Mineralogical Obseruations of 1790,
which was suggested by Georg Forster and dedicated to him, Alexander
von Humboldt not only had to deal with a theory of the influence of
basalt on the character and govemability of men but also had to
criticize in detail a Professor Witte in Rostock who wanted to explain
the Egyptian pyramids, the ruins of Baalbek and Persepolis, as well
as the edifices of the Incas, as products of lava outpourings and of
natural basalt formations. The way the Vulcanists were able to recognize
a crater lake in every pond made Humboldt hesitate to submit to
their theoretical accomplishments; only his stay on Tenerife in 1 799
and his ascent of Vesuvius in 1805 opened his eyes to volcanic phe-
nomena. According to the account in the fifth volume of his Kosmos,
he made up his mind in favor of the volcanic origin of granite in
1825-1826. On the other side, the intimate connection between Nep-
tunism and Romanticism cannot be ignored; it was not only Novalis,
Baader, and Theodor Komer, with t.heir (at least metaphorical) attraction
439
Chapter 2
to mining and their aversion to the demiurgic function of fire, who

stemmed from Abraham Gottlob Werner's Geognosie. 7
For Goethe, this was not a question of deciding a disputed question
in science. Instead, he was choosing between two elementary metaphors
for the trustworthiness of the ground beneath our feet-or, still more,
of the foundation of our life-world. On the occasion of some other
earthquakes he writes to Charlotte von Stein: "The earth continues
to shake. On Candia many places have sunken, but we, on the ancient
sea bottom, intend to remain motionless like the sea bottom."8 Do
we not understand better the way Goethe was stirred by granite-
an emotion whose literary outcome, in the essay of January 1784,
should perhaps be connected to the planned "Roman liber das Weltall"
[Romance on the subject of the universe], and regarding the pathos
of which Battiger reports that Goethe had found, "in the organization
of granite, the divine Trinity, which can only be explained by means
of a mystery."9
The "Treatise on Granite" and the Neptunism of his geology de-
veloped the forms by means of which to deal, by contemplating the
ground that has grown up, with the decline of confidence in the world
after Voltaire's mockery of Leibniz and Pope. Finally, [at this point,]
it is no longer speculation to understand Goethe's view of Napoleon,
a quarter of a century after the first tremor of the necklace affair, in
a similar manner, as the elementary experience of a new political
solid ground, however terrible the price that had had to be paid to
achieve this solidity might later appear to him to have been.
When, in 1814, he looks back on the genesis of his "Prometheus,"
here too the mythical figure's aesthetic defiance is entirely transformed
into a gesture of the effort to gain an unshakable ground. In looking
for "something that would establish my independence" he found, "as
the surest basis for that, my creative talent." It was the natural gift
that belonged entirely to him insofar as "nothing external could either
favor it or hinder it." It was supposed to have been the idea of "founding
my whole existence on this, mentally," that had transformed itself,
for him, into an image: "I was struck by the old mythological figure
of Prometheus, the Prometheus who, separated from the gods, peopled
a world from his workshop." 10
One who then takes a new look at the fragment and the ode becomes
aware for the first time of the way Goethe gradually locates the con-
gruence between his forms of life and his formula for life. The lines
440
Part IV
of the ode, "Musst mir meine Erde / Doch lassen stehn ... " [My earth
you must leave me / Still standing ... ], stand out as an expression of
the innermost apprehension of this experience of the world. The dra-
matic fragment, a year before, had expressed this even less intuitively,
but also in a way that is closer to the six-year-old's basic idea about
the inviolability of the soul. It had now really come very close to
Spinoza's theorem of perseverance:
Wir alle sind ewig.
Meines Anfangs erinnr ich mich nicht,
Zu enden hab ich keinen Beruf
Und seh das Ende nicht.
So bin ich ewig denn ich bin.
[We all are eternal.
I do not relnember my beginning;
I have no calling to come to an end,
nor do I see the end.
Thus I am eternal because I am.]
Goethe had read Spinoza for the first time in the spring of 1 773.
Unexpectedly, in relation to the history of its influence, the ode, in-
asmuch as it proceeds less argumentatively and more metaphorically,
is already at a greater distance from the initial impression made [on
Goethe] by Spinoza. II
The way in which we take the ground on which we stand for granted
as part of our life-world is something that we realize only as a result
of its being endangered-as a result of its negation. When Faust, at
the beginning of Part II, surfacing from the gloom of the Gretchen
tragedy, a wakens to new life in a "pleasant neighborhood," "bedded
on a flowery sward," he is not only amazed that he is still, and once
again, there, but above all that the ground under his feet still sustains,
and still sustains him. That which is celebrated in the mythical doctrine
of the elements in Pandora as resistance to demiurgic exploitation by
the smiths, "Erde sie steht so fest!" [The earth stands so firm!], is for
Faust the experience of a trustworthiness that overwhelms him in this
catastrophe: "Du, Erde, warst auch diese Nacht bestandig" [You, earth,
were steadfast during this night, too.] The fact that it could have been
different makes the barely endured danger into an elemental suspicion,
which, however, is retracted as unjust.
But with Pandora and the introductory scene of Faust Part II we are
reaching far ahead, so as to trace out the transition of the telepathic
441
Chapter 2
earthquake experiences into metaphors of the trustworthiness of the

ground. Already in the first half of the eighties the evidence accumulates
that the solidity of the ground on which he and the preconditions of
his existence rest is no longer something that he takes for granted as
part of his 'life-world.'
In 1 781 - the year in which he first mentions the plan for a "novel
[or "romance": Roman] about the universe," a project that is already
'romantic' in that an object that is at most suited for didactic poems
is now recognized as capable of 'romance' - Goethe warns Lavater of
the "secret arts" of Cagliostro, who had made a great impression on
Lavater, who was always inclined to credulity. Goethe has "signs, not
to say information, of a great mass of lies that skulks in the darkness."
The image with which he tries to influence the unsuspecting Lavater
affirms the easy confusion of what is actually subterranean with what
is supposedly superterrestrial [i.e., supernatural]. "Believe me, our moral
and political world is undermined by subterranean passages, cellars,
and sewers-as great cities usually are-the connection and the cir-
cumstances of the inhabitants of which no one probably thinks about
and reflects on; except that to one who has some knowledge of them,
it is much more comprehensible when in one place, on one occasion,
the ground collapses, and in another fumes rise up from a chasm,
and in a third, strange voices are heard. "12 Here we learn what a
"life-shaping feeling" ["Lebensgefohl"] is and how it is able to manifest
itself in metaphor.
More than three years later- it is the year of the "Treatise on
Granite" - Goethe alludes to the political situation and the diminu-
tiveness of the Grand Duchy, in writing to the duke (who is just then
traveling in Switzerland) about the progress of activity at home, and
the possible futility of all of that, in case the larger framework should
be shaken: "Meanwhile we continue with our own antlike activities,
as though there were no such thing as earthquakes. "13 The nature of
Goethe's basic frame of mind in these years, his sensitivity to the
instability of the ground, his aversion to any approach to chasms, is
reflected again a year before the political earthquake in a letter of
Karl Philipp Moritz, author of Anton Reiser and of the later Go'tterlehre
[Theory of the gods], from Rome on August 9, 1788: "I hear your
\varning voice when 1 come upon chasms, and quickly dra\v lny foot
b ac k .... "14
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Part IV
Are there grounds for saying that Goethe ever became aware of
the way in which his telepathic participation in the shakings of the
ground made him receptive for his actual experience of the course
of history as the downfall of a world? It is hardly surprising, any
longer, that in his reluctant and contradictory drama written for the
celebration of the vanquishing of Napoleon-Des Epimenides Erwachen
[Epimenides's awakening]-there are immediately two earthquakes,
which symbolize the two great downfalls in his historical experience.
This doubling of his consciousness of the insecurity of the ground on
which everything stands only becomes conceivable after both his con-
frontation with Napoleon (in which he stood his ground) and the collapse
of this reliable formation as well. The symmetry, in the drama, with
the downfall of the admired [Napoleon] consists precisely in the fact
that the restoration of happier circumstances depends on the same
principle as the collapse of the security of former times: on the un-
dermining of the ground. The allegorical figure of Hope expresses
this in the second act:
1m Tiefsten hohl, das Erdreich untergraben ...
Doch wird der Boden. $leich zusammenstiirzen
Und jenes Reich des Ubermuts verkiirzen.
[Undermine the earthly kindgom with cavities at the deepest level. ...
But the ground will presently collapse
And cut short that empire of arrogance.]15
In the drama, what had once been only a chasm and a threat becomes
the only prospect of a free future. Here Goethe pronounces one of
those apocalyptic theses that may sound comforting after a successful
process of consolidation, but which, as instructions on how to reach
still other futures, make up the fatalistic content of utopian eschatologies:
"The world sees itself destroyed-and feels better."
Part of the symmetry here is the fact that Goethe had already
applied the image of the a wakening of Epimenides to himself once
before. e It had been immediately after his return from Italy and while
he was feeling alienated from the reality of Weimar, at a point in
time, that is, in which Moritz still thought he heard the voice warning
him away from chasms: " ... and what I experience now is just what
Epimenides experienced after his awakening."16
This is also the time referred to in what he writes in the Daily and
Annual Notebooks for 1789, where he says that he had hardly had time
443
Chapter 2
to settle himself again in the circumstances and affairs of Weimar

"when the French Revolution unfolded and attracted to itself the
attention of the whole world." But already four years before the
landslide, he goes on, the necklace story had made an "unspeakable
impression" on him. Cagliostro's influence, against which Goethe had
warned Lavater, extends directly into the affair, the imposture, in
which it has never been fully clarified who was the manipulator and
who was the dupe. Goethe's reaction to the distant event, by which
the shadow of a dubious affair fell irrevocably on the queen, seems
entirely out of proportion to the event's importance; it is telepathic,
as in the case of the earthquake at Messina. "In the immoral abyss
of the city, the court, and the state that presented itself here, there
appeared to me, like specters, the most frightful consequences, of
whose appearance I could not rid n1yself for a long time .... " Even
to Goethe, the strength of his assertion may have made the trust-
worthiness of his memory seem doubtful. But there were witnesses
who dared to express themselves about the strangeness of his behavior
at that time only now, four years later, because they had considered
it a delicate matter in a different sense. It had been so far from normal
"that friends with whom I had been staying in the country when the
first news of this matter reached us admitted to me only later, when
the Revolution had long since broken out, that to them at the tilne I
had seemed as though mad." 17
One can no longer blame this behavior on the crazy doings of the
genius period. A life that was made highly artificial by its hermetic
isolation - in a way that was made possible only by the "thinness of
life in Weimar"IR-depended entirely on internal consistency, \vhich
he maintained by means of a pedantic regimen of caring for himself.
Goethe reacts exceedingly strongly to the feeling of impotence \vith
respect to external events. His conception of existence is directed at
the individual's autonomous power to 'make' his life authentically.
His alliances with powerful people, including that with the duke of
Weimar, are always based on not allowing them to become superior
powers to himself, however necessary they are in order to neutralize
other factors. There is method in this. He expressed that hilnself once,
in regard to his relationship with Schiller, in the sentence hvhich is
fundamental for his self-assertion): "Every man, \vith his lilnitations~
has to gradually construct a method for himself, 111erely in order to
· "19
1lve.
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Part IV
The term method has to have laid aside its modem and Cartesian
intention of objectivity in order entirely to enter the service of the
subjectivity that forms itself immanently. What had constituted its
meaning for theory-its communicability, without any remainder, from
individual to individual and from generation to generation - is negated
here. Method is precisely what the fathers always fail in and what
grows out of opposition to them. For Riemer, Goethe explains this as
follows: "Method is what belongs to the subject, since the object is,
after all, familiar. Method cannot be handed down. An individual for
whom the same rnethod is a need must find it for himself. Actually
only poets and artists have method, since what matters to them is to
come to terms with something and to set it in front of themselves. "20
His behavior in the days of the necklace affair is a symptom of [his
having] a presentiment of the failure of the "method" of his first
decade in Weimar. It is the autumn during which Goethe finds his
"Prometheus" ode again in Jacobi's Spinoza.
To this sensibility a new epoch announces itself in which it will no
longer be possible to defend and to put into effect one's own life plan.
Only when what is alien in aspect adverts back to what is proper to
him-when Napoleon adverts to Werther-does a new phase begin.
From the point of view of the first violent shaking of his world, one
can understand that Goethe began to come to terms with reality again
only when he not only experienced, in his own personal life, the fateful
effects of the heir and executor of the upheaval of which he had a
presentiment then but also saw him in person before him as one who
staged and demonstrated his own "method" and sought to integrate
the author of Werther into it. And Goethe has to write the drama to
celebrate the defeat of this patron of his insatiable needs for security!
That drama itself became an expression of his recovery of his security
in the "method" with which he had tried, a quarter of a century
earlier, to overcome, by theatrical means, his first glimpse into the
abyss of the necklace affair. Nothing was more characteristic than
Goethe's initial intention of turning the Cagliostro and necklace affair
material into a comic opera, which the Zurich composer Kayser was
to set to mUSIc.
It then became one of his weak stage plays, the Gross-Cophta. Almost
nothing of the initial bewilderment can be observed any longer, with
the exception of one single passage in which the original agitation is
expressed with the original words: "What have I heard, and into what
445
Chapter 2
an abyss of treachery and baseness have I 100ked!"21 These are the

words of the knight, Greville, who had overheard the instigation to
the great coup of the girl who participates in Cagliostro's clairvoyance
fraud. I think we see the late metaphor of the "priming powder for
an explosion," which is directed at the other great shock of the year
1 785, in its imaginative context when we combine it with the image
world of the earthquakes, abysses, underminings, and shipwrecks that
relate to this point in time.
In regard to the year 1793, Goethe wrote down an observation that
refers to his brother-in-law Schlosser's doubt about whether in the
contemporary world as a whole, and especially in the German world,
there were still problems that could be dealt with by a scientific society.
He, Goethe, had continued to believe in this firmly. "And thus, for
myself at least, I still held fast to these studies, as though to a beam
in a shipwreck; because for two years now I had experienced directly
and personally the fearful collapse of all established conditions. "22 In
this respect the days that he spends in France, during the campaign,
appear to him retrospectively as "symbols of the world history of the
time." People would be lenient with him, the active, productive spirit,
"if the overthrow of everything in existence terrified him, without his
ha ving the slightest idea of what should result from this that would
be better, or indeed merely different." At the end of 1 793 he sees
his Biirgergeneral [Citizen-general] produced, on his own stage, suc-
cessfully. But here the mastering of reality through theater nevertheless
becomes suspect: " ... the play was repeated, but the originals of these
amusing apparitions were so frightful that even their phantoms had
to be alarming."
When Goethe completes Die natiirliche Tachter [The natural daughter]
in March 1802, it is not only the prudence that achieves political
survival through concealment that he abandons. In contrast to the
O
'current events' drama of the plays about the Revolution, this is the
mature articulation of a personal experience of the unsteadiness of
the ground, of the ominous reference of natural to political instability,
and of the interchangeability of their threats, as images. Eugenie, the
'natural daughter' and, as such, a victim of dynastic intrigue, first
comprehends herself as a political figure when the monk pictures the
exile to which she is condemned as a chance both to save herself and
to help the miserable inhabitants of the distant islands, and intends
by means of the great rhetoric of the liability of everything present,
446
Part IV
nearby and native, to collapse to make this exile appear to deserve

her consent. Here the terrifying picture of the destruction of Lisbon
returns. As they look at the proud harbor city from which Eugenie is
supposed to leave her country forever, he puts before her eyes the
nocturnal vision of this destruction: The loss by which she is threatened
as a result of an expulsion that has been decreed by human beings
only affects what can be annihilated at any moment by nature. What
seems unshakable, as though established and ordered for eternity, is
undermined, in its foundations, by its invalidity. Only in a nocturnal
presentiment is it possible to perceive how the ground is already
unsteady and how what appears splendid in the daytime is capable
of crumbling into rubble.
The preaching monk is confident of the power of his rhetorical
images to impress. He does not even consider it necessary to apply
them specifically to the situation of the prince's daughter who seeks
his advice. He lets the doom speak for itself and, thinking that he has
already prevailed over her, only urges her to hasten her departure.
But the equivalence of the images - of the fearsomeness of nature,
on the one hand, and political fate, on the other-insidiously asserts
itself. The rhetoric is reversible: One thing can become a metaphor
for the other. Eugenie has gathered, for herself, a different conclusion:
that the political structure out of which and by which she is supposed
to be expelled is also liable to collapse. In the monk's vision of the
earthquake she has before her something that does not let her hesitate
a moment before refusing the (unexpectedly useful) advice to depart.
What until then had appeared impossible and intolerable-to withdraw
into the protection of a bourgeois marriage, which she has been offered,
and to put her confidence in the threatened state of what ,threatens
her-is now the conclusion she draws. It is not a decision in favor of
I
a political underground, but rather of a nonpolitical interim.

Eugenie sets up, associatively, the same relation between tellurian
and political conditions that Goethe had experienced in his own case
between Lisbon and Messina, on the one hand, and the necklace affair
I
and the Revolution, on the other. For Eugenie, too, memories are
suddenly present, memories of admonishing and threatening references
to the instability of political circumstances. What comes to her from
her own early times matches, almost to a hair, what the monk has
just presented to her as the nightmare of the threatening collapse of
her world, so as to ease her departure for another one:
447
Chapter 2
Diesem Reiche droht

Ein jaher Umsturz. Die zum grossen Leben
Gefugten Elemente wollen sich
Nicht wechselseitig mehr mit Liebeskraft
Zu stets erneuter Einigkeit umfangen.
[A sudden downfall threatens this kingdom. The elements that are
fitted together into a great life no longer want to embrace one another
with the power of love so as to produce continually renewed unity.)23
When Eugenie withdraws into the narrow world of the bourgeois
household, she finds a new set of metaphors for the permanence of
the ground, which is no longer the dubious ground on which the state
is constructed but rather the natural, undisturbed [der gewachsenel ground
of the homeland, which offers itself as a basis on which to survive in
a latent state:
Nun bist du, Boden meines Vaterlandes,
Mir erst ein Heiligtum, nun ruhl ich erst
Den dringenden Beruf, mich anzuklammern.
[Now for the first time you are a sanctuary for me, ground of n1y
fatherland; now for the first time I feel an urgent calling to fasten
myself (to you).]
When Goethe wrote this he did not yet know that when everything
solid was reeling he could encounter still another form of stabilizing
power, unexpectedly and contrary to the outcome of the Natiirliche
Tochler: political power itself in the form of the Corsican emperor. For
Ludwig Borne, who sees this as comtemptible, Goethe \vill be the
"fool for stability." And as for his early turnings, he himself describcd,
in Dichtung und Wahrheit, how in the short phase in which he drc\v
near to Pietism faith had appeared to him as "a great feeling of security
in regard to both the present and the future ... founded on confidence
in an immense, supremely powerful, and inscrutable being," the offer
of which he was unable to avail himself only because the doglnatic
content both in the conversations between Lavater and the pious ladies
and in Basedow's wrangling repelled him.2.\
Across half a century, the terrifying image of Lisbon breaks through
again in the Natiirliche Tochter. But the gesture of self-assert ion has
changed. The boy's metaphysical trulnp \vith the guarantee of iln-
448
Part IV
mortality no longer takes the trick any mQre than the defiance of the
aesthetic son of the gods, "Musst mir meine Erde / Doch lassen stehn"
[My earth you must leave me / Still standing]. Now everything cul-
minates in the posture that the poet expresses as the "urgent calling
to fasten myself [to something]." The strength necessary for survival
changes into the capacity for resignation, for shortening the front that
is exposed to collision with reality. When Napoleon's downfall brings
the second earthquake, which could provide new room for surviving
self-assertion, it is too late; the projection of the Prometheus idea onto
the emperor makes it impossible to derive self-gain from his catas-
trophe. Instead, it completes [Goethe's] resignation. Even the demon
against whom the poet was able to hold his own had not been a match
for God, for fate, in the place of which he had wanted to put politics-
indeed, himself, as politics.
The double earthquake in Epimenides is the last answer to the boy's
theodicy question that remains in an image: That which destroys is
already secretly the creative. The temple priest who sleeps through
the downfall is no longer the creative Titan himself, but only the
onlooker of higher powers, which do not allow the finality of a ruin
to be dictated for them. Epimenides is an onlooker like the poet. In
1806 he had written to Zeiter in Jena that in the bad days, which he
had come through without great harm, it had been no trouble for
him to take an interest in public business; "in that way I could abide
in my cell and ponder my innermost concerns.' '25
Zeiter, ten years younger than himself, is the first other person who
has something of Prometheus in him-who is deemed worthy to take
it up, once Goethe had rid himself of it as something unmanageable
and was now inclined to honor it in other people: "There is really
something Promethean in your way of existing, which I can only gaze
at in astonishment and admire. While you bear coolly and with com-
posure what can hardly be born, and make plans for future satisfying
and creative activity, I have behaved like one who has already departed
across the Cocytus and has had at least a sip of the waters of Lethe. "26
Far back lies the diary entry in which Goethe designated with the
Titanic role even what he had to suffer under the "terrible- climate":
"Suffered like Prometheus. "27 What he had in view was no longer the
sculptor-god but instead, at least for a moment, the sufferer on the
crag of the Caucasus. The same god partook of both the former and
the latter greatness.
449
Chapter 2
An occasion to take a position with respect to the frivolous use of

the predicate "a god" presents itself at the beginning of 1808. According
to Riemer's report, Goethe had heard that people called him a godlike
man. His response is intentionally paradoxical: "Ich habe den Teufel
vom Gottlichen!" [Roughly: "To the devil with godlikeness!"]. Is that
an abdication? Is he no longer able to be a god, or does he no longer
want to be one? The reason that Goethe gives, according to Riemer,
points toward the experience of powerlessness, but also toward vexation
with the role of an Olympian. It is no help to him, he says, when
people call him that but still do what they like, even deceive him.
People only use that term for soemone who lets them have their own
way. The supposed god, he says, is the dupe: What he yields from
his absoluteness, the others take in order to be absolute too. The god
creates the inducement for others to want to be gods too, so as to
oppose him. It is a role that is made futile by itself 28
One cannot imagine this piece of dialectic being played between
Goethe and Riemer without their remembering the saying that they
had found and made a fixed one, between them, the year before, on
the day of the inspection of the battlefield ofJena. Goethe's abdication
of the attribute of godlikeness on this February 1, 1808, clearly stands
in the context of a crisis that developed around the mythical diagram
of the difficulty of being a god. The early pathos of the aesthetic Titan
had been based on the implication that a god could be a match for
a god, as Prometheus was for Zeus. In contrast to that, the "extra-
ordinary saying" will become the ultimate formula of resignation as
soon as one reads it in the contrary-to-fact mood of melancholy: Only
a god could have been a match for a god.
Goethe probably hardly went that far, in 1808, in applying the
saying to himself. He protests against being called a godlike man
because people did this only to provide an occasion for testing their
own self-will. One will not have to imagine the horizon of this experience
as too extensive. The little world of the theater often sufficed Goethe
as a representative sample of the great world. In September 1807 the
theater in Weimar had been opened again with the "Vorspiel auf dem
Theater" [Prologue on the stage] that had been added to Faust. One
can read this prologue, which originated after 1800, as a piece of the
poet's definitive de-Prometheanization, pulled this way and that be-
tween the demands of the world, of himself, and of his material.
Wer sichert den Olymp? vereinet Gotter?
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Part IV
Des Menschen Kraft, im Dichter offenbar.t!

[Who safeguards Olympus and unites the gods?
The power of man, revealed in the poet!)
That is only ironical pathos now, on the losing side in the force field
of the prologue, which is ruled by the 'realism' of the practitioners:
Was tdiumet Ihr auf Eurer Dichterhohe?
Was macht ein volles Haus Euch froh?
Beseht die Gonner in der Nahe!
Halb sind sie kalt, halb sind sie roh.
[What are you dreaming in lofty poet-land? What gives a crowded
house delight? Observe the patrons near at hand! Half are cold; half
are not too bright.J
In the language of Homer, Hesiod, and Pindar, the unshakability of
the seat of the gods was the contrasting image to the instability of
the earth; now it is employed ironically in order to reduce to absurdity
the self-praise of the poet, who certifies that human power, as displayed
in poets, safeguards Olympus and unites the gods. Only the Clown f
knows the fitting answer to this: "So braucht sie denn, die schonen
Krafte ... " [Well use them, then, these marvelous powers ... J.
Goethe's protest against the "godlike man," in 1808, refers back
to the setting of Sturm und Drang, in which such terms as gods, gigantic
spirits, demons, and devils had been just as cheap as they were unspecific
and mutually interchangeable. In the wild intensifications of this lan-
guage every means was quickly used up, and divinity did not need
to be taken more seriously than demonhood. Stolberg reports in June
1 776, from Weimar, that Goethe spoke of those who do not bow
down before the Christian truths as "gigantic spirits": "If he exuberates
in it further, this obstinate defiance will make his heart cold, too. "29
Stolberg, who, with his brother, had witnessed Goethe's arrival in
Weimar on November 26, 1775, and who was facing a decision whether
to move there himself as a chamberlain, expressed agreement, in
December 1776, with the severe warnings that Klopstock had expressed
to Goethe regarding his doings it)· Weimar. The correspondence went
from hand to hand. Klopstock feared that Goethe would influence the
duke toward wildness, with his all too 'geniuslike' mode of life, by
which he thought the opportunity for an alliance between princes and
men of learning was put at risk. Goethe's answer had been rude, and
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Chapter 2
Klopstock's final word a termination of their friendship.30 Stolberg

then writes to him that Goethe deserves to lose his friendship. All of
this has to do with the exaggeration of his consciousness of himself
and with his self-definition of a role that Stolberg describes as follows:
"He is stubborn in the highest degree, and his inflexibility, which he
would gladly assert, if it were possible, against God, has already made
me tremble for him often. God, what a mixture, with the head of a
Titan against his God, and then giddy with the favor of a duke. "31
All the linguistic elements of the Promethean self-conception and self-
presentation become evident to the observer of Goethe's first ap-
pearance in Weimar. And not only to him - for a small world, this is
the arena of an event from which Klopstock is not the only one to
expect great things: the final patronage of the spirit by power.
Charlotte von Stein hesitates as to how she should describe the
impression made by the new figure in the world of Weimar. Still, the
letter in which she does that is, for the first time, written in German,
by her own admission under the influence of this same Goethe. The
fact that he has been able to accomplish that causes her to remark,
uneasily, " ... what else do you suppose he will do to me?" So she
has difficulties with the language, and when she writes that she is
getting along "wonderfully" ["wunderbar"] with Goethe, one can read
it also (or instead) as "strangely" ["wunderlich"]. The more a person
can grasp, the darker and more shocking the whole becomes for that
person and the more likely he is to lose the path of composure. This
is approximately what she writes, when one translates her German
into German German. And further: All of this reminds her of the fall
of the angels, because "the angels who fell were certainly more in-
telligent than the others .... "32 The confusing ambiguity that she cannot
comprehend morally even impels her to say that she now calls him
"my saint, and besides he has become invisible to me-disappeared,
some days ago-and lives in the earth, five miles from here, in mines."
Goethe sees himself no differently when he has passed one of his
tests of his fortune, an assault on what, if it was not impossible, had
certainly appeared impossible: the ascent of the Brocken in the winter.
Stylizing his audacity, he writes (only in August I 778) to Merck that
the responsible forester had been beside hilnself with amazelnent
"because, living for many years at its foot, he had always thought it
ilnpossible." To Charlotte he writes immediately and froIn the spot:
"It is after all impossible to say with one's lips \vhat has happened to
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Part IV
me .... God deals with me as with his old saints, and I don't know
why it happens to me." He has gained the desired "sign of attachment"
for the "more than motherly guidance of my wishes," has made his
existence "symbolic" in one more respect, has been on the summit-
"although for eight days npw everyone has assured me that it is
impossible." There is a touch of blasphemy in this going to the summit,
in the old tradition of what happens on mountains, because up there
he had "offered the dearest thanks to my God on the devil's altar."
A year later Goethe still celebrates the date and asks Charlotte to do
so with him: "A year ago at this hour I was on the Brocken and asked
the spirit of heaven for much that has now been fulfilled. "33
What he reports to Frau von Stein two years later still about his
roamings with the duke is no longer a test of his fortune or the
exaltation of a sign, but it is nevertheless clothed in the secularized
language of equating oneself to God: " ... we climbed, without being
either devils or Sons of God, on high mountains, and to the pinnacle
of the temple, there to gaze on the kingdoms of the world and their
toil and the danger of plunging down all at once. "34 When, then, in
the subsequent text of the letter an association with the biblical Trans-
figuration is added to the association with the Temptation, this is
enough to put the excess of blasphemousness into the ironical category
of the merely linguistic grazing of limits.
In the language of the time-or better, of the agitated people of
the time-confrontation with what they had overcome, even if it was
only what they thought they had overcome, was sought after. In that
connection the difference between the tempter and those who are
tempted is not so important, and to say of a particular human figure
that it was a god, was godlike, was a saint, or that it was a devil,
demonic, a fallen angel, is an insignificant distinction. By destroying
their seriousness, the Enlightenment set these terms free for aesthetics,
even if it tried, too, to leave unimpaired, and to carry along with it,
their daring quality. Gleim, who later became the proverbially "old
Gleim," reports from a visit in Weimar at the end of June 1 7 7 7 what
he apprehended at an evening gathering whose hostess was Duchess
Amalie. People read aloud from the newest Gottingen Musen-Almanach
[Muses' almanac}; Goethe, too, whom Gleim at first did not recognize,
participated. Here, Gleim undergoes an experience of evidence: "But
suddenly it was as though the Satan of high spirits took the reader
by the scruff of the neck, and I thought I saw the wild huntsman
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Chapter 2
before me in bodily form. He read poems that were not in the Almanac
at all, he changed into every possible tone and manner. ... 'That is
either Goethe or the devil!' I cried to Wieland, who sat opposite me
at the table. 'Both,' the latter replied .... "35 At almost the same time,
in his poem "An Psyche" [To Psychel, Wieland had granted Goethe
all the attributes of a creative god:
Er schafft,
Mit wahrer, mach tiger Schopferkraft
Erschafft er Menschen; sie atmen, sie streben!
In ihren innersten Fasem ist Leben!
[He produces - with true, potent creative power he produces men;
they breathe, they strive! In their innermost fibers is life!]36
I
When devil and god blend with one another in this way, the "fixed
idea" of this life figure should not be forgotten: Functionally, Pro-
metheus is iden-tical with Lucifer. Both are bringers of light in diso-
bedience to the ruling god.
The arrogance without which the attitude of distance in the later
reversion to this figure would not be intelligible is of the 'test -of-
fortune' type: All provocations directed 'upward' serve to make sure
of what remains inviolable. The earth, the hut, the hearth-these were
the ode's key words for the incontestable possessions that the ode's
Prometheus wanted both to hold up before Zeus and to know were
withheld from his power. Fire is obvious; earth can be understood in
tenns of the earthquake trauma. Something must still be said regarding
the hut. We know approximately how Goethe will have seen it, because
as early as November 1772 Prometheus's name appears at the very
end of his first, anonymously published pamphlet, Von deutscher Baukunst
[On German architecturel. The master builder of the Strasbourg ca-
thedral, Erwin of Steinbach, is not only compared to the Titan-he
surpasses him by conducting the happiness of the gods down to the
earth, by mediating, with beauty, between gods and men. It is an
aesthetic Prometheus, but not yet, on that account, a rebellious one-
more nearly reconciling.
The relation between this pamphlet and the ode, which is written
two years later, follows from the fact that in Prometheus's hut the
prototype of the Gothic cathedral is presented. The eulogy of Er\vin
of Steinbach is a polemic against the French Jesuit Logier's treatise,
Essai sur l'architecture [Essay on architecture), of 1753-1 755, \vhich, in
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Part IV
the German translation of 1768, Versuch. iiber den Baukunst, was in

Goethe's father's library. Logier defends classicism with the argument
that it exhibits the original natural character- that the classical form
of the pedimented hall supported by pillars can be derived from the
simplest form of construction, from the leafy hut made of four corner
posts and a gable roof of branches placed on top of them.
Where culture can be criticized or legitimated by reference to the
original state, such constructions are not contemptible. No more, then,
is the polemic against them, as conducted by Goethe. What is original,
he says, is the tentlike hut that is composed of crossed poles in front
and behind, with a ridgepole connecting them. This, he says, is the
original form of the Gothic pointed arch and vault that are perfected
in Strasbourg.
This dispute, of whose means of argument Goethe himself speaks
contemptuously as "protoplastic fairy tales," would be less interesting
if it did not allow us to infer the kind of imagination that will lead
Goethe to have Prometheus point to his hut, in the ode. It does so
because the hut's inviolability consists in the original simplicity of its
organic shape [natiirliche Wuchiforml. Being fully conversant with its
pattern mak~s it possible, after every burst of bad weather, to renew
one's shelter" in a moment, not to speak at all of its insensitivity to
earthquakes. It is the same as with fire, whose theft and possession
means simply being able to ignite it. Alliance with the elements, with
elementary form, makes one invulnerable. If one thinks of the do-
mestication of comets and of lightning, which the century of the
Enlightenment saw as the signs of its success, then the setback that
was involved in becoming conscious of the ungovernability of the
uncertainty that was most inimical to man, the uncertainty of the
ground, also becomes evident. The occurrence in Lisbon had, in the
last analysis, favored Rousseau, who also stands behind the archetype,
here, of the simple hut and its indestructibility. Thus Prometheus
consolidates reason's defiance on the lowest level, the level of survival.
This was the immortality that the boy's thoughts had turned to after
the sermon about Lisbon, only now conceived entirely in terms of
earthly materiality.
Of course, between Prometheus's original hut and the Gothic ca-
thedral a bridge was necessary, insofar as the hut was only a work
of the bitterest necessity, whereas the cathedral \vas a work of the
highest flight of invention, and the new consciousness of aesthetic
originality would hardly want to admit the derivation of the one from
the other. But the singer of Erwin of Steinbach's praises sees in the
strict dissociation of the necessary from the beautiful the danger that
art will be devalued to a mere ornament of life, which will have to
lose the status as beyond question that Goethe expresses with the
metaphor of God's tree. "They want to make you believe that the
fine arts arose from the inclination that we are supposed to have to
beautify the things around us. That is not true!" The genius, who is
productive nature itself, does not decorate the things that had already
long been in use; instead he produces, at the same time as the means,
the form as well: With the first hut he already produces the arch and
the vault. He does not oppose a different world to the world of fear
and care; instead, from what fear and care have produced perforce,
he takes the material that he subjects to further shaping. "Art fashions
for a long time before it is beautiful, and yet it is then true, great art,
indeed often truer and greater than beautiful art itself. For man has
a shaping nature that immediately manifests itself in action when his
existence is secured. As soon as he has nothing to worry about and
to fear, the demigod, active in his repose, reaches about for material
into which to breathe his spirit. ... "37 If Goethe had already known
the Prometheus myth more accurately when he wrote this, it would
have become evident to him at this point that with the means of self-
preservation, Prometheus had given man the freedom in which to
develop further a world of forms that had been a product of mere
necessity, that is, to develop the hut into a cathedral. But the fun-
damental idea of the ode, despite its new attitude of defiance, will
still be the pointing to his hut and hearth. Prometheus, the potter who
makes man, in the last verse of the ode is only the logical consequence
of the Prometheus who has become certain of his inviolability, with
his earth, hut, and hearth, in the first verse.
Now that we have excavated the final stratum in which the earliest
appearance of Prometheus in Goethe's works can be grasped, it is not
surprising that even before the fleeting connection of the Titan with
Erwin of Steinbach, accomplished only in the last line, a different
association had appeared: with Shakespeare. For if the idea of organic
naturalness [Naturwiichsigkeitl could be played off against classicislTI in
the archetypal instance of the Gothic cathedral, Shakespeare \vas the
corresponding literary case. What Goethe- attempting to integrate
the arrogance of creativity into the evidence of what is natural-says
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Part IV
about the impression made by the Gothic cathedral holds in exactly

the same way for Shakespeare. Further, he had the "same fate as the
master builder who piled up mountains into the clouds," the fate of
being forgotten among men. And Goethe immediately continues this
idea with the legitimating equation of the human product and the
product of growth: "To few was it given to beget a Babel idea in their
soul, entire, great, and necessarily beautiful down to the smallest part,
like trees of god."
In the address, "Zum Schakespears Tag" [For Shakespeare's day],
that Goethe had given after his return from Strasbourg and his ap-
plication for admission to the bar in Frankfurt, in honor of Shakespeare's
name day, on October 14, 1771, Shakespeare's naturalness was con-
trasted to the classicism of tragedy, with its 'unities,' in the same way
that, a year later, the Steinbach eulogy confronted the classicist ideal
of the columned hall with the principle of the Gothic. The type of
perception, proceeding by means of contrast, is the same. Into this
presentation of contrast there falls, for the first time, the name of
Prometheus.
Common to Shakespeare and Erwin of Steinbach is the fact that
the work of art is not produced according to a rule that is prior to it,
but rather, in being produced, it makes the rule evident, even if in
fact there happens to be no other work of its kind. Shakespeare,
Goethe says, had gone back to the principle of creation in order to
make his people appear entirely as nature. It is not a matter of course
that Prometheus should make an appearance just here. Because the
myth leaves open the relation between the creations of his workshop
and the prior givens and prescriptions of an already existing nature,
Goethe, in the ode, intensifying the blasphemy by the post-Olympian
reference, will make Prometheus produce men in his own image: "a
race to be like me .... " The ancient myth presupposes an incapacity
of the ceramic creatures for life: a discord between the way they are
equipped and the preconditions set by a nature that they do not belong
to. The Shakespeare of the name-day address-who, like Erwin of
Steinbach later on, is an aesthetic competitor of Prometheus - also
has to surpass Prometheus's performance, which Goethe had before
him, in an image modeled on those handed down from antiquity, as
composed of diminutive little men, in the Titanic potter's worship:
"He vied with Prometheus, copying his men, in every feature, only
on a colossal scale: That is why we fail to recognize them as our
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Chapter 2
brothers; and then he animates them all with the breath of his spirit,
he speaks in each of them, and we recognize their kinship to us. "38
So this Prometheus is not in the difficult position of being unable
to inspire his terra -cotta creatures with life without the help of the
daughter of Zeus; here already, he operates with the breath of his
own spirit, in the manner of the biblical molder of man. The reference
to Prometheus, as a figure of nonobligatory originality, reinforces the
act of recklessness that is accomplished by naming Shakespeare, con-
trary to the taste of the time, a time that Goethe sees as having lost
the capacity even merely of judging from the point of view of and in
accordance with nature-because "from youth onward we feel every-
thing constricted and affected, in ourselves, and see it so in others."
Shakespeare is the answer to the Rococo, the fulfillment of the cry
for nature, of which his people are made. For the corrupt taste of the
present time needs nothing less than "almost a new Creation," in
order to liberate itself from its eclipse. There is a need for a new
Prometheus.
It is not only the day of the creation of man by Prometheus, which
can be repeated aesthetically, that is mythical. The experience of
access to such originality is also mythical. The poet who was to con-
tribute more than any other to allowing the Enlightenment to miscarry
and making possible the greatest accomplishment of Romanticism-
which was the translation of his worksg-is perceived in a way that
is predefined by the metaphor of light. The first pages of Shakespeare
affected him, Goethe says in celebration, like the renewed eyesight
of one who was born blind: "I knew, 1 felt most vividly that my
existence had been expanded by an infinity; everything was new to
me, unfamiliar, and the light, which 1 was not used to, made my eyes
hurt." Shakespeare is the Prometheus who champions nature in dra-
matic poetry against classical correctness, of which Goethe says here
that the French model instances are "parodies of themselves." What
he does not notice is the possibility of seeing this opposition as pre-
figured in Prometheus's opposition to Zeus. The Prometheus of the
Shakespeare address, just like the Prometheus of the eulogy of Erwin
of Steinbach, is not yet a figure of the conflict of gods, but only of
the possibility of one demiurge surpassing another, aesthetically.
Goethe's little ritual was the investiture of Shakespeare for a new
aesthetic self-understanding, the discovery of a virulence that had
scarcely announced itself when Voltaire smuggled Shakespeare's plays,
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Part IV
as contraband, onto the Continent on his return from England in 1728,

without suspecting how definitively they would finish off his own
reputation as a dramatic poet. It is noteworthy in regard to the German
stage, and to Goethe's own relation to his youthful self-comprehension,
that he forgot this piece, too, of his early productions connected with
the name "Prometheus." In his memoirs he makes no mention not
only of the text but of the celebration as well. He did not include the
address in his editions of his works; in fact he no longer even possessed
it. For the Goethe who was so open to the ominous, there would no
doubt have been matter for serious reflection in the fact that the
Shakespeare address was preserved for posterity (though not similarly
exposed to public scrutiny) by the same Jacobi who had preserved
and brought to light the "Prometheus" ode. Ernst Beutler conjectures
that Goethe had given Jacobi a copy of the address, in his own hand-
writing, in 1 774, no doubt at least partly because Herder had published
his Shakespeare essay in the journal Von deutscher Art und Kunst [On
German manners and art] in 1 7 73. The address was printed for the
first time in 1854.
That the celebration of Shakespeare's name day really was a ritual,
and was not first invented by Goethe to go with the text, we know
from his father's account book. Here, there is an entry for food and
musicians for the Dies onomasticus Schakspear [Shakespeare's name day].
The father's library also contained the first volume of Wieland's trans-
lation of Shakespeare of 1762, with an insert that was a handwritten
extract from the Mercure de France of December 1769, describing the
first English Shakespeare celebration in Stratford in this same year.
With this celebration Shakespeare had been posthumously elevated
to the status of honorary citizen of Stratford.
The entry for the name-day ritual in the father's bookkeeping brings
us up short. For the son who was just then applying for entrance to
the bar may, with this address, have strengthened his father's doubts
about whether the expenditure for banquet and music might not have
encouraged the wrong tendency. A spotlight falls on the antagonism
tha t will be reflected in the conflict of gods in the Prometheus texts.
Because for the author of the dramatic fragment and the ode, Pro-
metheus is also, and not least, a son - the son of Zeus.
Since Hesiod's Theogony, and with the authority of the mythologist
Diodorus Siculus, who became predominant in the tradition, the Titan,
Iapetus, had been Prometheus's father. But a variant existed in which
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Chapter 2
Zeus was his father. Zeus was credited, in any case, with a large
number of lapses, so that one more, with the daughter of Oceanus,
mattered little. There are good allegorical reasons for this genealogy,
which have to do with the name "Prometheus. "h A Prometheus story
involving 'forethought' was only acceptable, when allegory was sys-
tematized, if it became an appendix to Zeus's 'providence,' and thus
also his offspring. Goethe did not yet know anything about this, because
this version in particular was not included in Hederich's lexicon. Al-
though at the end of the article the "interpretation from another
quarter" is passed on, that some people understood Prometheus al-
legorically as the divine Providence "by which the first men and every-
thing were created," no genealogical displacement is noted as being
involved in this. In order to grasp his conflict through the [Prometheus]
configuration, all that Goethe needed was the license of ambiguity.
At most, what he would have been able to look up was the singular
version in Bayle's Dictionnaire, where Bayle declared the best tradition
to be the one according to which Prometheus was the product of a
lapse on the part of Hera, with the giant Eurymedon, and Zeus had
only used the theft of fire as an occasion to rid himself of the bastard
who was a disgrace for that reason. Possibly the older Goethe could
have found charms in such a constellation.
It would be an exaggeration to want to find enmity in Goethe's
relationship to his father. But even as aesthetic self-proclamations tend
to be counterpositions-art against art (potentially), god against god-
so also Goethe's resolution to be a poet is formed in opposition to
the realism, the life plan, the sober pedantry, and (in spite of the entry
for the Shakespeare day) in opposition to the account book of his
father. Above all, this: His father did not accept him as an awakening
genius, an artist-god, a demiurge-Titan. This became evident in his
resistance to the enticement of his son to go to the court at Weimar.
When the contact with the heir to the prince's position had come
about, in Frankfurt, the father's mistrust of all contact with the \vorId
of [princes'] courts came to light. As a Frankfurter, he always had in
his hand the trump card of the memory of what had, after all, happened
in this town to Voltaire during his flight from the king of Prussia. In
no way could drawing near to "the great ones" please Goethe's father,
"because, in accordance with his Imperialisf convictions, he had ahvays
kept his distance from the 'great ones.' "
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Part IV
Now, for the way the father overtakes .the son, in the dimension
of his lifetime, there is incomparable 'pregnance' in the way in which
he makes use of popular aphoristic wisdom to support his rooted
aversion to courtly affairs. An instance is the (not incidentally, myth-
ological) dictum that one who keeps his distance from Jupiter also
stays out of reach of his lightning bolts: "Procul aJove procul a fulmine."
Alongside this, Goethe also informs us of the method he used to defend
himself against his father; it is precisely the method of the free variation
of such aphorisms, extending as far as their parody and inversion-
a method that will be an indispensable presupposition for our hypothesis
that he invented the "extraordinary saying."
The procedure he used in defending himself against his father,
before his departure for Weimar, must have seemed important enough
to Goethe even as he grew older - important both in relation to his
self-discovery and no doubt also as a process that would be fruitful
in the future - that in the fifteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit he
shows us, by a collection of examples, how, in each case, he dem-
onstrated the reversibility of the meaning of these sayings. Thus the
perspective of a view of the world 'from below' was confronted with
its opposite pole "when, imagining something great for ourselves, we
also chose to take the part of the great." The ways of reading the
"extraordinary saying" [i.e., part IV, chapter 4] will show how close
it is, not only in style but also in its aspect as a recommendation of
resignation, to his father's unforgotten warning. When the historian
Heinrich Luden visits him on December 13, 1813, in order to explain
to him the plan for a Teutscher Journal [German journal] directed against
Napoleon, Goethe adjures him almost with his father's admonitions
"to let the world take its course and not to meddle with the quarrels
of kings, in which after all your voice and mine will never be listened
t o. "39
On the occasion of Wieland's review of Giitz, after the ill feeling
caused by Gijtter} Helden und Wieland,j Goethe indirectly brought out
the way in which his father's sayings stood in his way. According to
Johanna Fahlmer's account, he shows her the pages of the Merkur;
that, he says, was what annoyed him so about Wieland and provoked
him to give vent to his feelings against him: "Because the tone....
Yes, that's it! That's it! That is exactly how my father speaks .... My
father's tone! That is just what enraged me. "40 His father's tone: On
the very day of his departure from Frankfurt, October 30, 1775, Goethe
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Chapter 2
notes down, when his recollection could not be sharper, what his father
had conveyed to him as his last word, "as a parting warning for the
future"-namely, the apocalyptic threat, associated with 'immediate
expectation,' from the Gospel according to Matthew: "Pray ye that
your flight be not in the winter, neither on the Sabbath day." Not
without malice, the just -escaped Goethe adds that this was said while
his father "was still in bed. "41
But it is not only the tone. His father's doubts about 'genius' and
about intercourse with the great had stood in the way of his living
the aesthetic life to the full. And there father and God become fused
as the embodiment of the single resistance with which he is already
dealing when he detaches himself from his Pietistic phase with the
consciousness that this is an act that goes against the will of a divinity
who will not allow him to come to himself. To quote once more what
he had written to Langer, his friend from his studies in Leipzig, in
January 1769: "It seems that God does not want nle to become a
writer." The fact that he had asserted himself against that God made
him able to identify himself with Prometheus and to work up his
situation as a drama "in defiance of God and luen." This is where
the formula belongs with which, in the Prometheus fragment, the son
rejects his father's emissary and his will:
Ich will nicht ... Ihr Wille! Gegen meinen!
Eins gegen eins!
Mich diinckt es hebt sich.
[I do not want ... your will! Against mine!
One against one!
It seems to me that it cancels out.]
That is, after all, already the principle in accordance with which the
"extraordinary saying" is constructed-the first sign of its inexorable
emergence.
The tone of the father-God belongs to the language in which pre-
given life forms and concepts of existence are offered-a finished
world into which to enter and take one's place, just as the world of
the nature god Zeus is a completed world, and if one molds additional
creatures to add to it, that has to be rebellion. The demiurge, Pro-
metheus, can only see the world as a desert, as materia bruta [brute
matter], as the scene of a single colossal exertion, by which to make
a world, for the first time, from what is almost nothing. So Goethe
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Part IV
feels, as he works up the defiance of his situation: "What it costs to

sink wells in the desert and to build a hut. ... "42
But the demiurge in the desert, in the realm of the un-pre-given,
with his hut and his spring, is an illusion, not a possible metaphor for
Goethe's actual course. The latter is determined by what his father
had refused, by the proximity of the great, by the screened-off realm
of the court, by the artificiality of the sphere constituted by Weimar.
Consequently, in his late recollection the Promethean attitude does
stand immediately alongside the alliance with Weimar, as a transition
from one world to another one. Only the other world was disposed
to furnish and to tolerate the degree of unreality that was necessary
in order to be Prometheus without defiance, to be an author without
the conflict of the gods. In Goethe's encounter with the demonic man,
finally, the negation of his father's bourgeois wisdom - that one should
keep one's distance from Jupiter and his lightning-is completed.
But then, in Rome, Goethe normalized his relationship to Jupiter.
At the Pyramid of Cestius he begged for patience - the Titan carried
out a subtle and suspended sort of capitulation.
Dulde mich, Jupiter, hier, und Hermes ftihre mich spater
An Cestius' Mal vorbei, leise zum Orkus hinab.
[Put up with me here, Jupiter, and later let Hermes lead me quietly
down, past Cestius' pyramid, to the underworld.] k
This is the conclusion, in the seventh "Roman Elegy," of the supplicating
conversation with Jupiter Xenius. From this point of view Titanic de-
fiance shows itself as an error proper to the northern world, in which
Jupiter does not present himself in his abundance and in which-
since he appears as a god who is too poor in his self-expenditure-
he challenges the aesthetic will to opposition. But here, where no wells
need to be sunk in the desert, there is nothing left for the Titan's
defiance to do, and it is transformed into contemplation's ease of
mind. Everything is already present as the other's nature; the world
is not "colorless, shapeless, "I not a world to which a "discontented
spirit" would have to oppose something of its own. And this hospitable
Jupiter is explicitly the "father" who calls back, as though he is still
dealing with Prometheus's presumption: "Dichter! wohin versteigest
du dich?" [Poet! where do you think you are climbing?]'lIl In February
1788, during the Roman carnival, Goethe sketched the Pyramid of
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Chapter 2
Cestius and expressed the wish to be buried there. For his son, the
wish was to be fulfilled.
The appeal to Jupiter Xenius, at the Pyramid of Cestius, is a re-
cantation of Goethe's original Prometheus conception. But it is not his
final word on it. From the perspective of this point in his life, one can
understand what the recasting of the myth in his Pandora will mean.
It will be one of the reversals that Goethe was so fond of since the
time of his battle of proverbs with his father: Prometheus is a Titan
but a father nevertheless, Prometheus in the role of a father, Prometheus
without an opposite pole to defy. Thus the work of the coincidentia
oppositorum [coincidence of opposites] is carried out on the myth itself.
Only because Prometheus is the father of Philerus does he remain a
figure of hope for things to come, although he belongs to a dull
demiurgic prior world of caves and fire. The figure is withdrawn from
the possibility of identification with the poet. It represents conditions
and circumstances that, in their relation to elementary needs, are prior
to any aesthetic freedom. Prometheus is no longer the inventor of the
original hut, in the form of which the Gothic cathedral was prefigured;
his sphere is shifted into the hollow places of the earth, where the
demiurges who serve him forge the tools of the history whose course
had come so close to Goethe since his invocation of Jupiter at the
Pyramid of Cestius. Its closest approach was impending for him.
Translator's Notes
a. In the original, these two sentences lack the concrete references to "the free agent" that I
have inserted in square brackets. By their constnlCtion, which is hardly acceptable in English,
they emphasize the obscurity of just what this locus of complete responsibility, outside the
causal web of nature, is.
b. The "Paralogisms of Pure Reason," in the Critique if Pure Reason A 341-405, B 399-432, are
a critique of the idea of the subject as a (possibly permanent) substance.
c. This and the following quote are from Dichtung und Wahrlzeit, ed. Scheibe, vol. 1, p. 527.
d. These prose translations of "Grenzen der Menschheit" are from David Luke, Goethe (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1964) pp. 59-61. The paraphrases of the poem, in this paragraph, are also
based on Luke's translation.
e. Epimenides was a Cretan who was said to have slept for fifty-seven years.
f. The Clown is the third character in the "Prologue on the Stage," together with t he Director
and the Poet.
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Part IV
g. The great German translations of Shakespeare, by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig
Tieck, were made initially between 1797 and 1810 and published between 1825 and 1833.
h. Prometheus means "forethought."
i. Reichsbiirgerlich refers to the feeling of allegiance to the Holy Roman Empire, as opposed to
the local principalities.
j. Goil von BerLichingen (1773), Goethe's famous early play. "Gotter, Helden und Wieland" [Gods,
heroes and Wieland] (1773) was a satire on Wieland's role as transmitter of Greek literature
and myth.
k. Translations by Luke, Goethe, p" 98 (first translation is slightly revised).

l. Ibid., p. 97.
m. Ibid., p. 98.
3
Prometheus Becomes
Napoleon, Napoleon
Prometheus
Schlecht! So nimmt man keinen Kaiser gefangen ....

- Goethe at a rehearsal of Calderon's Zenobia, 1815
[Terrible! That's not the way you take an emperor prisoner. ... ]
Nietzsche, in 1885, wrote down a penetrating observation on the subject

of Goethe's relationship to Napoleon. It is in the context of the question,
"What did Goethe really think about the Germans?") As about many
things around him, Nietzsche says, he never spoke clearly on this
subject. "His life long he was a master of subtle silence." With a
mental leap to a higher level of generality, Nietzsche tries to penetrate
this concealment. He would like to know what it was that was able
to excite Goethe at all. Neither the wars of liberation [against Napoleon]
nor the French Revolution did so - "the event on whose account he
rethought his Faust, indeed the whole problem of man, was the ap-
pearance of Napoleon."
Did Nietzsche exaggerate here? Perhaps because it was important
to him to demonstrate his conception of the superman, to make him
recognizable by the effect [or "action": Wirkungl that he would have
produced precisely where it could be raised to a higher power, where
action [Wirkung] called forth action in return?
I don't think so. There is an obscurity about the way Goethe related
to Napoleon that cannot be clarified by seeing the emperor, at their
meeting in Erfurt, acknowledge himself a reader of Werther and confer
his order on the poet. This could only be described as "a really in-
significant mark of honor" from a man who "throughout his life had
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Part IV
authors come to him at breakfast."2 The fact that Goethe wore his
Legion of Honor even after the emperor was overthrown was not
only the obstinacy of old age, which set itself against the patriotic
delirium, but also an elementary gesture of self-preservation.
Nietzsche speaks of Goethe's rethinking of man in view of Napoleon.
For him, that is only one of the many great sayings that he uttered
and on which he was shattered. For Goethe, as the one who survived
it intact, this rethinking was a trauma of identity. The continuity of
the relation to Napoleon extends further than anything else in Goethe's
life, with the exception of that of the two figures, Prometheus and
Faust, a continuity that for its part includes the complex involving
Napoleon. It is on the level of these motifs that the defense of his
own identity lies-an identity that is always the identity of a life
concept and outline. Its defense is accomplished by the roundabout
means of mythicization. The more terrible the figure of Napoleon
proves to be in historical retrospect, the more ingenious the auxiliary
concept of the "demonic" becomes, which harmonizes the evidence
of the great moment of the meeting in Erfurt with the senselessness
typified by the Egyptian adventure.
When Goethe in 1829 gets an opportunity to read the Memoires sur
Napoleon of the emperor's secretary Louis-Antoine de Bourrienne, he
says of the book that it has given him "the most remarkable illumi-
nation," because although it was written perfectly soberly and without
enthusiasm, one nevertheless sees thereby "what a magnificent char-
acter the truth has, when someone dares to say it."3
The book still occupies Goethe the next day. It makes all the nimbus
and every illusion about Napoleon of the writers of history and poets
disappear "in the face of the dreadful reality." But for Goethe the
figure remains separate from the effect of his actions: " ... the hero
does not become smaller, on the contrary, he grows in truth." But
the declarations about Napoleon become more severe. When the con-
versation comes to the author of a long and worthless epic, Eckermann
expresses his astonishment that people take such pains and have re-
course even to artificial means, all "to make a bit of a name for
themselves." What is the response of one who also took pains for that
purpose? Almost condescendingly he sets Eckermann straight and
diverts the conversation to Napoleon: "Dear child ... a name is not
a small matter. After all, Napoleon smashed almost half the world in
pieces to make a great name for himself!"
In the course of his reading of this book Goethe speaks with Eck-
ermann, on April 7, about the campaign in Egypt. The "dreadful
reality" of which he had spoken on the previous occasion has now
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Chapter 3
become "the Facta [actions] in their naked, exalted truth." Every con-
jectured expediency in the Oriental enterprise has proved to be a
cover containing nothing but caprice: "One sees that he undertook
this campaign merely in order to fill up an epoch when there was
nothing he could do in France to make himself master." Napoleon
handled the world in the same way that the virtuoso and composer
Hummel handled his grand piano. But in all of that he had something
that Goethe evidently thinks is not a matter of course: "Napoleon was
especially great in that he was at all times the same. Before a battle,
during a battle, after a victory, after a defeat, he always had a firm
footing and was always clear and resolute as to what was to be done.
He was always in his element and a match for every moment and
every circumstance, just as for Hummel in the end it is all one whether
he plays an adagio or an allegro, whether in the bass or in the treble."
The book, he says, refutes a whole series of legends about Napoleon's
behavior in Egypt. For example, about his descent into the pyramids.
But he really had visited the plague victims, in order to show by his
example that the plague could be conquered if one could conquer
one's fear of it.
And now, at this point, where he seems to have reached the greatest
possible distance from the adventurer and his dreadfulness, Goethe
does something that he does again and again directly, but even more
frequently indirectly: He seeks to compare himself to Napoleon. When
a putrid fever was prevalent he himself had been inescapably exposed
to infection, "in which case, merely by a resolute will, I warded off
the sickness." The subsequent generalization serves to suspend the
point of view, which goes back and forth between Napoleon and
Goethe. "It is unbelievable what the moral will can do in such cases!
It, as it were, permeates the body and puts it in an active state that
repulses all harmful influences .... Napoleon knew that well, and he
knew that he did not risk anything in giving his army an impressive
examp Ie. "
Although he occasionally goes to great lengths to compare himself
to Napoleon, still he hesitates, linguistically, to equate himself to him.
The "moral will" that he attests to for himself is at the same time a
way of avoiding the neighborhood of the "demonic," the presence of
which, in his own case, he denies. There is an intermediate field of
attributes of extraordinariness and productiveness that can be shared.
Included among these, astonishingly, is even "illumination"
[E rleuchtung].
In the spring of 1828, Eckermann is unwell and sleepless, and is
also undecided whether to remedy the complaint, to get [medical]
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Part IV
advice. Goethe mocks him on that account. Here keywords are used
that almost automatically lead to Napoleon: fate and demon. In regard
to Eckermann' s disinclination to take care of himself, Goethe modifies
a statement that he has from the mouth of Napoleon, who was referring
to politics: "Man's darkenings and illuminations determine his fate!"
And then follows a subjunctive, leading to the other key word. "It
might be necessary for the demon to have us, daily, in leading strings
and tell us and drive us to whatever is to be done." Eckermann' s
weakness leads Goethe to Napoleon's strength: Napoleon was "always
illuminated, always clear and resolute," so that he could immediately
put into effect what he recognized as necessary. One could say of him
that he was "in a state of continuous illumination"-taken altogether,
"a fellow whose example we admittedly can't imitate!" Eckermann
supposes, against this, that with advancing age Napoleon had certainly
lost his illumination. To this Goethe agrees; he, too, had not written
his love songs and his Werther a second time, because that "divine
illumination through which extraordinary things come into existence
is something that we will always find allied with youth and
·
pro ductlveness .... "
Now Eckermann responds with a key word that Goethe picks up-
genius. Where it is present, the productions come in quick succession:
"Because what is genius but the productive power by which deeds
are generated that can show themselves before God and nature and
for just that reason have consequences and endure." Nothing about
the 'quality' of the deeds and their consequences; only their intensity
matters. In this Napoleon, we are told, after the privations and sleepless
nights, the frightful exertions and excitements of his life, there should
not have been a single sound part left when he was forty. Napoleon
was forty when he met Goethe in Erfurt and Weimar.
Once again, on this March 11, 1828, the conversation comes to
Napoleon vvhen they are discussing Byron. In middle age, we are told,
the fate of such men, who were the favorites of fortune in their youth,
often takes an unfavorable turning. The demon is not only a driving
force, he is also a traitor. Whenever Goethe turns to the demonic he
gains the advantage of being able to extricate himself again from
comparisons with himself. Then it is easier to speak harsh words:
"The man must be destroyed again!" -when he has fulfilled his mis-
sion. The demons trip him up again and again, until finally he succumbs.
"So it went with Napoleon and with many others."
There is no hint that Goethe could have been aware that he also
spoke of himself when he said that for those who have been abandoned
by their demon, it was then probably time for them to depart "so
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that something would still be left for other people to do also in this
world, which is meant to endure for a long time." It was only to
become manifest after his death how many people had waited for it
and with how much urgency. At this moment, on March 11, 1828,
Goethe's only (unexpressed) concern is with the self-confirmation in
the fact that he had stood opposite Napoleon at the zenith of the
latter's fortunes and had held his own against his gaze, when he was
still entirely under the inpetus of his demon.
The primal scene of all of Goethe's self-comparisons with Napoleon
is the meeting in Erfurt at the beginning of October 1808 -more
precisely, the moment in which he had withstood the eyes of the
victorious conqueror. What it meant to have been exposed to that
and to have endured it is something he only gradually became conscious
of It may not be possible to enter into this experience in an age that
demands at most that one encounter the gaze-not directed specifically
at oneself- of the great ones of the age on the television screen. But
Napoleon had already been, since the battle ofJena, exactly two years
earlier, the man who had unexpectedly endangered Goethe's life and
had altered it by threatening with annihilation the state of which he
was a minister-that is, had made the firmness of the ground on
which he stood uncertain and had make the distant recollection of
the earthquake of Lisbon into a close and urgent metaphor.
The tottering of his self-created world had immediately moved
Goethe to the most improbable thing, previously, that could have
been expected of him: to marry the mother of his son, to give irrev-
ocability to his human relationships. After this and in view of the
battlefield of J ena he had expressed, for the first time, the idea that
was to put an articulated end to his conception of himself as Prometheus:
that only a god could oppose a god. To have held his own against
the emperor's gaze was a test of this. It is not insignificant, in this
man, that- according to the account of the reliable witness Soret, who
had come to the court of Weimar from Geneva as a tutor to the
prince, and became a privy councilor there - as late as two years
before his death he blushed when he was spoken to regarding his
meeting with Napoleon, and turned away the question of notes of
that conversation. 4 He wrote nothing about contemporary events, he
said, that touched on interests that still existed; he avoided everything
that could occasion painful conflicts: " ... laissons ce soin a nos suc-
cesseurs et vivons en paix" [let us leave those cares to those who come
after us, and live in peace].
His frequent mineralogical companion when he was taking the cure
in Marienbad, the town councilor and magistrate in Eger, Joseph
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Part IV
Sebastian Gruner can scarcely understand. what Goethe's heightened

feeling relates to when Gruner reads aloud to him, in August 1822,
in the favored conversational context of the doctrine of color and
Napoleon, his own translation of Manzoni's ode on the death of the
emperor: "He was as though transfigured, and was wholly stirred;
fire flashed from his eyes .... "5 That is something that needs to be
understood.
What had happened in Erfurt that Goethe refused to (if one prefers
not to say "affected not to") record, that he kept as the memory of
a singular experience that could not be shared, that perhaps could
not even be communicated? A letter to Silvie von Ziegesaar shows
that he had told at least her about his conversation with Napoleon in
Erfurt immediately afterward. But it had been Christiane a who had
pressed the wavering Goethe to go over to Erfurt, where the emperor
intended to assemble the princes around himself. On October 4, two
days after the first meeting with Napoleon, and still writing from
Erfurt, he thanks Christiane "for having urged me to come here," but
regarding the event he only remarks laconically that the emperor
"conversed with me for a long time in the most gracious manner."6
The outline of an account of how he stood before and withstood
Napoleon, which was written down in 1824 at the instigation of Chan-
cellor von Milller, left no impression anywhere in his autobiographical
writings.
On October 1, 1808, Goethe sees Napoleon for the first time at the
levee. This is immediately joined, for him, with his own life story,
because the setting of the event is familiar to him: "the long-familiar
premises, with new personnel."7 When he is sent for, the next morning,
to meet the emperor, the memory takes the form of stage directions
for a play: "The crowd withdrew. . . . I am called into the emperor's
private room. At the same moment Daru is announced, and is im-
mediately admitted. As a result, I hesitate. I am again called. I enter.
The emperor sits at a large round table eating breakfast. . . . The
emperor beckons to me to come forward. I remain standing before
him at a proper distance." There follows the exchange of looks that
decides everything: "After he had attentively looked at me, he said:
'Vous etes un homme' [You are a man]. I bow .... " And so forth. The
whole is not descriptive; it is the stage directions for a liturgy of
. .. .
InItIatIon.
Goethe emphasizes that in this conversation he gave the most nec-
essary answers, and in the most natural manner. This emphasis on
naturalness corresponds to the fact that the emperor objects, in regard
to a passage in Werther, that it is not in accordance with nature, just
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Chapter 3
as he "had felt very deeply the deviation of the French theater from
nature and truth." When Daru mentions to Napoleon that Goethe has
translated Voltaire's Mahomet, the emperor explains in detail how he
finds it out of place in the play that "the world conqueror gives such
an unfavorable description of himself." That is written out in such a
way that hardly any doubt can be left as to why Napoleon disapproves
of world conquerors being put in the wrong in this way. Moreover,
Goethe remarks to Boisseree on August 8, 1815, that Napoleon's
objection was "as accurate as could be wished." Above all, he can
now explain how Napoleon was able to correct Voltaire so cogently,
from his comprehension of the founder of Islam. Only the equivalence
between the comprehender and the comprehended can explain such
assurance: "After all, he, who was another Mohammed, had to under-
stand the subject well."
Now despite all of Goethe's bowing low before Napoleon we must
nevertheless look more closely at the way he evades the reproach
founded on that single lack of conformity to nature in Werther. He
answers "with a pleased smile" that he has to admit that "some lack
of truth could be detected in this passage," but that perhaps the poet
could be forgiven for making use of an artifice - and, furthermore, of
an artifice that was not so easy to discover- "in order to produce
certain effects that he could not have achieved by simple natural
means." The poet lays claim, in his field, to what his partner in the
conversation has long since, and always, claimed, in a different field.
In that field it is something that seems to have no need of justification,
and indeed is capable of none. In Napoleon he is confronted by the
maker of a history without any possible theodicy-just as the Sturm
und Drang poet had needed no other justification than that contained
in his work. Napoleon understands immediately that a comparison is
being constructed. He concludes his critique of French classical tragedy
with the words that such plays about destiny had belonged to a darker
age-what did one want with destiny now? Now, when after all one
was just in the process of taking over its management oneself. That
is contained in the emperor's saying (so inadequate in relation to
Goethe) that politics is destiny-a saying whose intended purport is
after all precisely that classicism's aesthetic 'fate' is replaced by the
claims of the Imperial will.
As a result of an indiscretion committed by Goethe's son, August,
we know still another detail of the conversation. He tells Chancellor
von Muller, in his father's presence, that his father had been required
to promise the emperor that he would write a "death of Caesar"-
in fact a better one than Voltaire's La Mort de Cesar.8 This drama of
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Part IV
1 732 had been judiciously chosen for a performance at the gathering

of the princes. Here Napoleon proposed to Goethe a subject that he
himself, as a youth, had wanted to treat, and he could not know that
the person to whom he was speaking had similarly dreamed the
youthful dream of a drama about Caesar.
Did Goethe, as his son's utterance allows us to assume, in fact
promise what he was required to promise? August's indiscretion con-
tains a hidden malice. The shadow of his father's conjunction with
Napoleon layover his life, too, after he had been refused permission
to take part in the liberation struggle and thus in the ascending move-
ment of the spirit of the age. As a result, Fichte's entry in his album-
"The nation expects great things from you, the only son of the only
[i.e., peerless] man of our age"-had become a burden to him. As
Charlotte von Stein had remarked in 1813, August was "the only
young man of rank who had remained at home here." So his de-
monstrative exhibition of his being initiated into his father's memories
of Napoleon was also a hopeless resistance to his enforced participation
in Goethe's isolation in his later years from the emotions of his
contemporaries.
So the conversation in Erfurt was, on both sides, about works. It
was as if the emperor wanted to show the poet right away how such
things were done on his side when he turned away and discussed with
Daru, his general intendant for Prussia, the question of the exaction
of contributions. Goethe, having become a witness of how destiny is
made with politics, almost unwillingly withdraws a little from this type
of work and stations himself in an alcove. In this same alcove, thirty
years earlier, he now realizes, he experienced gay and melancholy
hours.
It is the identity of his own life that this onlooker at the making of
history seeks to rescue. What he perceives distracts him into the pro-
tective comer of memory. He repeatedly emphasizes, while writing
down what he observed in the activity around the emperor, that he
could not forbear "to think of the past." He devotes a larger part of
his notes to such thoughts - to the old carpets, to the portraits that
have been taken down-than to everything having to do with this
present. It is the emperor who breaks through this recollection, by
rising and going toward Goethe, so as "by a sort of maneuver" to
separate him from the other participants in what is going on. This
becomes the moment of the great 'setting-apart.' The situation achieves
its equilibrium through the reversal of the motion by which Goethe,
on entering, had approached the breakfasting emperor. Now Napoleon
turns his back to the others and speaks only to Goethe - and only in
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Chapter 3
order to ask him whether he is married and has children. Napoleon

could not know that it was only as a result of his violent intervention
that this question could no longer create any awkwardness for the
person it was addressed to. If it is true that Napoleon invited him to
come to Paris, this is at any rate part of what he himself conceals
from us about the conversation. Important enough, but perhaps di-
verting us from more important things, is the information, in the notes,
that on October 14 Napoleon conferred the Order of the Legion of
Honor upon him. He tells only Silvie, on October 15 - in addition to
the fact that he had been honored with the Legion - that he had been
"urgently invited" to go to Paris, but that now, after the death of his
mother, he had to put things in order in Frankfurt- "these are all
beckonings and enticements that attract me toward the southwest,
while I have usually been in the habit of seeking my happiness only
in the southeast."
Our contemporary behavior researchers know what it means to
hold one's own against a stranger's gaze. For Goethe's contemporaries
it was an almost mythical moment. Heine writes, describing Goethe's
eyes, that they were "tranquil, like those of a god. It is, in fact, a
mark of gods in general that their gaze is firm and their eyes do not
jerk uncertainly this way and that."9 And, not by accident, Heine puts
Goethe and Napoleon on the same level in precisely this respect:
"Napoleon's eyes also had the characteristic just mentioned. That is
why I am convinced that he was a god." In the case of Goethe, Heine
knew what he was talking about, because he had not held his own
when he stood before Jupiter: "Truly, when I visited him in Weimar
and stood in front of him, I involuntarily glanced to one side to see
whether I would not see the eagle next to him with the lightning bolts
in his beak. I was on the point of speaking to him in Greek .... "
Napoleon's divine gaze was present to Goethe to an advanced age.
On January 17, 1827 -a day, as Eckermann emphasizes, on which
Goethe was in a good mood - this mood is not disturbed even when,
in a circle containing his son, his daughter-in-law, and Chancellor von
Muller, the conversation comes to the period of occupation. Muller
refers to a letter of the French ambassador to the court of Weimar
at the time, in which mention was also made of Goethe. The letter,
he says, called Weimar fortunate, "where genius could have such an
intimate relationship with the highest power." That is a cue for the
subject of Napoleon. Nevertheless, detours are still needed in order
to reach it. There is talk of purchases by Frau von Goethe that had
not met with August's consent. The old Goethe knows a pertinent
story about Napoleon: "One must not accustom the beautiful ladies
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Part IV
to altogether too much ... because it is easy for them to go beyond

all limits. When Napole'on was on Elba he still received bills from
milliners that he was supposed to pay."IO In earlier times, too, Goethe
says, Napoleon did not easily yield to feminine wishes. A dealer in
fashions gave him to understand, on the occasion of a presentation,
that he did too little for his wife in this regard. Napoleon did not
respond to this piece of enterprising impudence with a single word,
"but he gave him such a look that the man immediately packed up
his things and was never seen again." In response to his daughter-
in-law's question whether this had still been in the period when Na-
poleon was consul, Goethe answers, not without reference to himself,
that the story was probably about Napoleon the emperor, "because
otherwise his gaze would probably not have been so terrible." So the
"demonic" is not after all so completely inherent in the man as such.
Goethe's cheerfulness remains undisturbed by this indirect reminder
of the eye against which he had held his own: "But I have to laugh
when I think of the man whose limbs were frozen by that gaze, and
who probably already saw himself beheaded or shot."
On December 15, 1812, Goethe notes in his diary that the French
diplomat von Wolbock had notified Weimar of the emperor's intention
to pass through it, "as well as his having inquired after me." From
then on the diary contains the emperor's current whereabouts each
day, just as though these were data of the course of his own life. He
valued being relnembered by the defeated emperor no less than having
exchanged looks with the victor of Jena. Goethe's deep interest in
Napoleon's fate, right to its end, even survives his growing horror of
the Corsican's deeds. On August 13, 1813, he encounters the emperor
in Dresden where he is inspecting fortifications. In 1815 the episode
of the "hundred days" is reflected in his diary. On April 30, 1817,
we read: "At night, Napoleon's confession." On January 14, 1822,
again specifying the time of day: "Alone at night. Translated Manzoni's
ode on Napoleon." On August 15, 1828, there is the combination (not
untypical, for Goethe) of the Christian calendar of salvation with the
mythical one: "Day of the Assumption [of Mary], Napoleon's birthday."
The emperor's decline and end on Saint Helena played an extended
part in his reading. He reads Hudson Lowe's Memorial de Saint-Hetene
and other works on Napoleon's defeat and confinement. For Goethe,
the rocky island in the south Atlantic is the site of the conclusion of
the fate of a Prometheus to whom, in Erfurt, he had delegated his
early aesthetic self-interpretation and presumption. This delegationb
underlies both his loyalty to the Corsican's fate and the contrast he
sets up between himself and the other's demonic quality.
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Chapter 3
Before the battle at Leipzig Goethe had made a bet that Napoleon
would defeat the allies. When, after Napoleon's defeat, officers of the
allies sought him out and the Count Colloredo was quartered at his
house, he came to meet them wearing the cross of a Knight of the
Legion of Honor.
Nowhere does Goethe's affinity for omens become more evident
than in his relationship to Napoleon. When the latter escaped from
Elba there occurred, according to the account given by Sulpiz Boisseree,
the story of a ring carrying the head of Serapis, for which Goethe
had long been on the lookout, without being able to obtain it. At that
time a friend came to him with the words: "Guess what extraordinary
thing has happened." Goethe, ironically, entering into this 'sensational'
demand, answers: "The Last Judgment." The visitor-what else could
he do-answers in the negative. The next possibility of something
extraordinary that occurs to Goethe is this: "Napoleon has escaped."
This is followed, suitably, by the point of Boisseree's account: "The
next day the ring arrived." 11 What accumulates around Goethe's re-
lationship to Napoleon has - independently of the reliability of the
facts, because invented or exaggerated material would prove this just
as well-the dignity of 'significance.'
An additional omen was the fall of the picture of Napoleon, which
Joseph Sebastian Gruner, again, transmits-certainly reliably-follow-
ing Goethe's own narration. That is embedded in the story of another
omen. During an excursion to Franzensbad, Gruner shows Goethe the
sculpted representation of the emperor and his second wife on the
Louise Spring there. Gruner remarks what an impression of "clev-
erness" the little man makes, alongside Marie-Louise. Goethe responds,
"He was indeed extraordinarily ... clever, if he had only remained
within bounds, as he does here." 12
The magistrate tells the story of the construction of the enclosure
of the spring. Experts had been brought in from Prague, whose ac-
complishment, however, was only such that shortly after their departure
the construction collapsed. At that point the local carpenter was called
upon to make a less expensive setting, with no waste of time; the
result was that the mineral spring that was named for Napoleon becalne
separated from the Louise Spring. And this augury had been fulfilled
in reality.
Here Goethe breaks in. (How should he not have experienced O1l1ens
in relation to Napoleon?) "After the battle of Leipzig his picture fell
froln its nail in my room, for no known reason; vvhat do you lnake
of that?" In dark and superstitious ages, Gruner responds, people
would have considered this a sign from heaven announcing the birth
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Part IV
or death of a great man. Suddenly the proQuctivity of the Franzensbad

spring in omens strikes him as too modest. He reaches back to the
catchword bounds. It is characteristic of Goethe that he does not permit
other people to usurp his authority to reprimand the great. Conse-
quently we must first give Gruner's actual words: "When I look at
the mineral spring here next to the Louise Spring, I imagine Napoleon
separated from his son on the island of Saint Helena, how inwardly
confined his life is there, without any possibility of overstepping bounds.
Only a great spirit could remain steadfast in such a situation. Never-
theless, his confinement was meant to make him harmless; millions
of people were sacrificed on account of him." Goethe also thinks of
mankind and its welfare, but he evades the proffered verdict on Na-
poleon, preferring to stay on the subject of the spring and to credit
it with an effect on mankind: "Let us generate good effects for mankind
from this mineral spring or, as you call it, Napoleon Spring." The
account concludes laconically that they then drove back to Eger.
The high point of 'significance' lies in a coincidence that makes
Napoleon intercede posthumously and by an obscure path for the
thing that, for Goethe himself, was undoubtedly central in his life's
work: his theory of color. Here the ominous aspect grows out of the
C
demonic, which has the power to make heterogeneous things cooperate

in producing unexpected significance. The fact that Napoleon had
read Werther, had "always taken [the book] with him" and still had it
with him on Saint Helena-as Goethe knows as of 1829 and tells his
Russian translator, Roschalin-is not felt as an ominous 'significance.'
As a judge of literature, there is nothing demonic about the emperor.
But the way in which Napoleon, although or precisely because he was
no longer among the living, stood up for the theory of color- that
could affect Goethe deeply.
In the autumn of this year of 1830, in which Goethe worked on
the end of Faust II and began work on the fourth part of Dichtung und
Wahrheit, which was to contain the "extraordinary saying," and while
he contemplated Napoleon's death on Saint Helena, and received the
news of the death of his only son in Rorne, something strange happened.
On his return journey from Italy, where he had left August von Goethe
in Genoa, Eckermann saw in Strasbourg, in the display window of a
barber, a small bust of Napoleon, made of opalescing glass, which
seemed to him to present all the phenomena of the theory of color,
depending on whether one viewed it against the obscurity of the room
Iying behind it or in the reverse direction, from the room toward the
light of the street. Eckermann sees immediately that Goethe would
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Chapter 3
be fascinated by this figure. "In my eyes this glass image had an

inestimable value .... " 13 He acquires it and sends it to Weimar.
Still on his journey and still before the news of the death of the
young Goethe has reached him, Eckermann receives Goethe's letter
thanking him for the remarkable present from his travels. Goethe
acknowledges to his Eckermann that "on seeing the remarkable, color
transmitting bust" he had been impressed and overcome "by the
magnificent Urphanomen ['primal appearance': a term of Goethe's coin-
age], which stands out here in all of its manifestations." The fact that
in the accident of this discovery, in the capacity to perceive such a
thing, the "demonic" could have had a hand is at least hinted at in
the choice of an expression that cannot have been an idiom at this
time: "If your demon brings you to Weimar again, you shall see that
image stand in the fierce, clear sun.... " Unhesitatingly, Goethe lays
claim to Napoleon on the side of his theory of color: "Here one truly
sees the hero victorious on behalf of the theory of color too. My most
sincere thanks for this unexpected strengthening of the theory that I
value so much." What a hunger for other things than demonstrations.
After everything that Goethe had ever experienced and invented
between himself and Napoleon, this incidental knickknack episode had
to be incomparably important for him. He had after all already set
up-speaking to Eckermann on May 2, 1824-the most daring and,
in the horizon of his self-conception and experience of history, the
highest-pitched possible parallel: "Napoleon inherited the French Rev-
olution ... and it fell to me to correct the error of the Newtonian
doctrine. "
He uses the name of the "demon," as he so often does other things,
in, as it were, a displaced location: for the other person's fate, when
he had just related it to himself. Somewhat later, on March 2, 1831,
he confirms that the "demonic" appears not only in and in respect
to persons but also, even quite especially, in events, "and particularly
in all those events that we are unable to unravel by means of the
intellect and reason." That is still not an attempted definition of the
demonic, but it is a description of the resistance that characterizes it.
With regard to his own nature, Goethe denies that it contains a demonic
element; but he "has to submit" to it. Napoleon, on the other hand,
had had a demonic nature, in fact "in the highest degree, so that
there is hardly another to compare to him .... The Greeks counted
demonic natures of that kind among the demigods." Here it occurs
to Eckermann to ask whether Mephistopheles did not have demonic
qualities too. It is noteworthy that Goethe rejects this immediately,
and gives reasons: "No ... Mephistopheles is much too negative a
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Part IV
creature; the demonic, on the other hand, manifests itself in an energy

that is thoroughly positive." 14
How seriously, with how much weight, and above all how precisely
should one take an expression like that of the "demonic" in Goethe,
especially in its application to Napoleon? Initially, I think, the talk of
the demonic is only a renunciation of the frivolity with which Sturm
und Drang youth had conferred the attribute of "godlikeness" on
people. In connection with Napoleon, it still has a treacherous at-
tractiveness for Goethe's tongue. In a conversation with Chancellor
von Muller on March 23, 1830, this connection is established in a
domesticated form appropriate to old age. The subject, once again,
is Goethe's conversation with Napoleon. Muller presses Goethe's power
of recollection with the remark that it is after all terrible to have to
tell oneself that the event is already twenty-two years in the past.
Goethe parries this by saying that one must not even say such things
to oneself, "or it would be enough to drive one crazy." Napoleon is
not drawn into the almost modest comparison of himself to God that
Goethe adds; but if the talk had not been of him, one could hardly
imagine the same association of ideas: "To God, a thousand years are
like a day; why then shouldn't we, too, disregard such things, like
little gods?" It is an inversion of Muller's gesture of humility in the
face of the inexorability of time; one who has such an event behind
him is no longer affected by the enumeration of years.
Here there is no longer any more, either, of what Jean Paul had
mocked when, in a letter to Christian Otto written on June 18, 1796,
he describes his visit to Goethe: the house that startles him with its
Italian taste, the pantheon of pictures and statues, the gripping coldness
of the "fear" that oppresses his heart. Finally Goethe's appearance:
" ... At last the god comes toward me, cold, monosyllabic, speaking
in a uniform tone of voice."
Only at the very end-after the end-will Eckermann take up the
tone of apotheosis one more time. The conclusion of the second part
of the Conversations is among the finest specimens of German prose.
The morning after Goethe's death Eckermann has Goethe's servant
Friedrich open the room in which the corpse lies. The mixture of
temerity and reverence in these lines culminates in Eckermann's having
the shroud, by which the naked body lies covered, thrown back. It is
a moment of epiphany: "Friedrich unwrapped the cloth, and I was
astonished at the godlike splendor of these limbs. . . . A perfect man
lay before me in great beauty, and the rapture that I felt at this made
me forget for some moments that the immortal spirit had left such
an envelope. I laid my hand on his heart-there was a deep stillness
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everywhere-and I turned aside in order to give free rein to my

suppressed tears." That is no longer Goethe, that is Eckermann, but
nevertheless it is Eckermann faced with the dead Goethe.
If the attribute of the" demonic," in Goethe, is an index of the fact
that frivolity in dealing with the other attribute, that of "godlikeness,"
has disappeared, then the reason for that is above all to be seen in
Goethe's deeper intimacy with Spinozism. In its absorption by panthe-
ism, the godlike has become literally "indifferent" [gleichgiiltig "equally
valid," "interchangeable"], as a distinction belonging to absolutely
everything. The godlike could no longer be the exceptional; the demonic
became this. Everything that surpasses what is usual in human affairs,
everything that possesses the quality of being 'unattainable,' is assigned
to the status of the demonic. The demonic is not the antidivine, which
in pantheism is in any case still more precisely "utopian" than in
monotheism-because it has "no place."d Where it nevertheless seems
to appear, in language, a polytheistic background will always be found,
which one can understand as a sort of 'pantheism with divided roles.'
It is the aesthetic license of a metaphysics that, taken by itself, justifies
only nature's aesthetics and makes man's superfluous, because no
scope is left for it.
Goethe saw very clearly that in art the metaphysical pantheist must
practice his 'doubled truth' of polytheism. But morally, too, there is
no room in pantheism for the outsize dimensions of either good or
evil; nothing can be either for or against the god, because nothing is
capable of existing outside him or it. Here we begin to see what the
category of the demonic, as an intermediate realm that is not un-
ambiguously definable, will mean for the "extraordinary saying" in
which the fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit culminates. Against a
god, everything that is itself a god has power- something that it makes
sense to speak of only if there is not only one god.
True, Goethe denies that Mephistopheles, too, should be seen as a
demon. But the wager between God and Mephistopheles could not
exist if the deadly seriousness of dualism or the exclusiveness of mono-
theism were present between them. Thus the background of Faust is
transformed into at least an 'as if polytheism. Its trials of strength
are in earnest, but they are not definitive; rather, they are episodic.
In this ultimately neither metaphysical nor moral, but more nearly
aesthetic intermediate realm, Goethe installed Napoleon. In his trans-
lation of Manzoni's ode, "Der 5. Mai" [The fifth of May], Napoleon
is entitled, imitatively, the Schreckensmann [ten'ible Inan]; but for Goethe
he could never represent the purely evil will and could never have
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produced the mere failure of calamity. The ,demonic is a category that

is foreign with respect to the moral realm.
In connection with a conversation with Eckermann about Faust,
which had left him "for a while in silent reflection," Goethe explicitly
lays claim, in order to substantiate his notion of the demonic, to an
old man's view of things. He is not able, he says, to resist the thought
that "the demons, in order to tease and make fools of mankind,
sometimes bring forward individual figures who are so attractive that
everyone strives to match them and so great that no one reaches their
level. "15 As examples Goethe names Raphael, Mozart, and Shakespeare.
Then in turn, \vith Shakespeare (whom, in his early 'genius' phase,
he had put on a par with Prometheus) he now compares-not un-
instructively in regard to the aesthetic valence of the category of the
demonic-Napoleon. He is, it is true, described only as "beyond our
reach," and not also as "attractive." Eckermann pursues to its conclusion
the thought that, here as always, is already laid out for him to follow
Goethe in thinking, that "with Goethe, too, the demons may have
had some such thing in mind, since he too is a figure who is too
attractive for us not to strive to match, and too great for us to reach."
The connection goes by way of Faust. [It is evident] in a conversation
with Sulpiz Boisseree on August 3, 1815, a conversation that revolves
around Spinoza, the theory of color, and especially the completion of
Faust, about the end of which Goethe does not want to say anything
yet, although he describes it as complete, "very good and magnificently
successful." The transition of ideas that forces itself upon him conforms,
with the greatest possible precision, to Nietzsche's thesis that the ap-
pearance of Napoleon had caused Goethe to rethink Faust and the
whole problem of "man." "In the beginning Faust makes terms with
the devil from which everything follows directly. [Pause.] Faust brings
me to what I think, and have thought, about Napoleon. The man who
has and exercises power over himself achieves the most difficult and
greatest things. "16
An even higher estimate is contained in the remark that connects
the attribute of the demonic in the same manner with both Christ
and Napoleon. The criterion is power over the elements, in other
words, over nature. Regarding Christ, he says: "The magical influence
that emanates from his person, so that healthy people attach themselves
to him and the sick feel healed - his power even over the elements,
so that the fury of storms and of ocean waves is stilled before him-
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all of this, although in a predominantly divine nature, seems demonic

in character." Immediately juxtaposed to this sentence there follows
this, on the Corsican: "So, in Napoleon, the demonic was active to an
extent that it may not have been, in modem times, in any other
person. "17 Goethe himself had been able to experience a power over
nature that could be traced back to Napoleon's. ZeIter reports that
on May 3, 1816, Goethe had been sick in bed and it had seemed to
him "almost impossible" to take part in a great ceremony at court.
Then "happily a saying of Napoleon's" had come to his mind: "1'Em-
pereur ne connott autre mala die que la mort" [The emperor knows
no sickness but death]. Thereupon he told the doctor that if he was
not dead, he would be at his post punctually. "It seems that the doctor
and nature took this tyrannical saying to heart, because on Sunday
at the correct time I was in my place .... " Now one will still ask what
great ceremony all of this related to. It was the homage of the estates
to Carl August, who, as a result of Napoleon's downfall, had been
raised to the rank of grand duke; a homage on the occasion of receiving
his promise of a constitution, a promise he was to be the first of the
German princes to carry out, in that same month. Through demonic
induction, Napoleon had helped the (also promoted) "Minister of State"
Goethe to participate even in the celebration of the final triumph over
him.
The qualification made in the conversation with Eckermann, that
the demonic had been active in Napoleon to an extent that it had not
been in any other person "in modem times," had still been absent
when Goethe wrote to Knebel on January 3, 1807, that one would
have had to foresee that "the highest manifestation that was possible
in history" would come, as this one did, from France. "One denies
the extraordinary [reality] as long as one can." But there does seem
to be such a thing as a depletion of the potency of original powers.
Before Goethe now, in 1831, comes to speak of Christ and Napoleon,
he says by way of introduction: "It seems as though the demonic was
more powerful in earlier times and as if it does not find such opportunity
to manifest itself in a prosaic century. There are important traces of
it in the Old and New Testaments, and even in Christ features appear
that one would be inclined to put in that category." One will remelnber
this when Sigmund Freud, in his letter to Thomas Mann of June 14,
1936-operating on a higher level of irony-compares Napoleon to
Joseph in Egypt.
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A mark of the demonic figure is not only that it commands the

elements itself, but that it is able to induce this capacity [in others].
On a walk with Eckermann, Goethe comes to speak of the news of
the death of Eugene Napoleon de Beauharnais, the duke of Leuchten-
berg. He had been, Goethe says, one of the great characters, who are
becoming ever rarer. As late as the summer before, Goethe had met
him in Marienbad. There he had learned of his plan to connect the
Rhine and the Danube by means of a canal. "A gigantic undertaking,
when one considers the resistance of the topography. But to one who
served under Napoleon and, with him, shook the world, nothing seems
impossible. "18 Here, too, the schema is retained according to which
the resistance of circumstances, of matter, of the elements, still con-
stitutes the greatness of a man and of his action if he is someone who
is in the realm of influence of a demonic nature.
It is also measured by the vacuum that it leaves behind it. For
Goethe it almost goes without saying that Napoleon brought about
an agitation that calls for figures like himself, but in fact only favors
those of a lower rank. The heir of the Revolution, who seemed to
have closed the abyss into which Goethe had first looked at the time
of the necklace affair, left behind him a new abyss when he was gone.
In the year of the revolt against Napoleon, it becomes clear to Goethe
that only hatred had united the Germans, as he writes to Knebel on
November 24, 1813: "I only want to see what these people will set
about when he has been banished across the Rhine." He sees it up
to the very last. When reports of the continuing disturbances arrive
from Paris on March 21, 1831, he traces the "young people's folly of
wanting to share in influencing the highest affairs of the state" back
to the example of Napoleon. He has excited an egoism in the youth
of his country that will not let them rest "until a great despot arises
among them again, in whom they can see, on the highest level, what
they want to be themselves." 19
Nevertheless, as always in such remarks by Goethe, the demonic
man is in the right. For the world, for the others, the disadvantage
remains that the needs awakened by him cannot be satisfied again
by his like. "The unfortunate thing is that a man like Napoleon will
not be born again right away, and I am almost afraid that it will cost
additional hundreds of thousands of lives before the world gets some
peace agaIn.. "
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Goethe himself is always the point of reference-either openly or

covertly-when he speaks of Napoleon. Because among the latter's
consequences there is also the fact that now the 'active man' [der tatige
Mann] can only prepare many a good thing for the future in seclusion,
while the exercise of literary influence is not to be expected for years.
Amazingly, Goethe's attitudes, taken together, include no bitterness
toward him who had made himself into something that the world
lacked. Because, as though the balance of greatness, on the one side,
against victims, on the other, had not been set up by this "terrible
man" himself, he now appears as what the world, again, lacks, in
order finally to be able to equalize this balance.
With his decision to prepare, in seclusion, a future that would scarcely
be accessible to him, himself, Goethe is on the threshold of the last
year of his life. One wonders whether, at the moment of this con-
versation, he remembered the words Napoleon had spoken to Chan-
cellor von Muller on April 26, 1813: "Do you Germans know, too,
what a revolution is? You don't know, but 1 know!" It contains Goethe's
historical legitimation for Napoleon. For Goethe, Napoleon was de-
termined-not, indeed, in his greatness, but in his role-by his in-
heritance of the Revolution. It was, again, Nietzsche's clairvoyance for
subterranean resemblances of an extreme character that saw Goethe's
relation to Napoleon centered entirely on the pole of the French
Revolution, or, more specifically, on its Rousseauian aspect. Goethe,
for Nietzsche, is entirely averse to the eighteenth century and to its
Revolution: "I see only one man who experienced it as it must be
experienced, with nausea - Goethe. "20 This yields a common formula
for Napoleon and Goethe, based on the type of "return to nature"-
in spite of Rousseau and in opposition to Rousseau- that they carry
out: Goethe was a European event as "a magnificent attempt to over-
come the eighteenth century by a return to nature, by an ascent to
the naturalness of the Renaissance- a kind of self-overcoming on the
part of that century," as Napoleon, too, was "a piece of 'return to
nature.' "21
All talk of the "demonic" cannot confuse Nietzsche in his insight
that Goethe had such a lasting involvement with Napoleon precisely
because he was himself "a convinced realist." Wherever it appears,
realism is always a concept based on contrast to the unrealities of an
epoch - and just this, that he stands "in the middle of an age \vit h
an unreal outlook," that he defines or suffers its end, constitutes the
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"realism" in Goethe's relation to Napoleqn: "He had no greater ex-

perience than that ens realissimum [most real being] called Napoleon."e
In their view of this phenomenon, Goethe the historian and Goethe
the demonologist were not always in complete accord with one another.
The demonic is also a category opposed to history, to the extent that
history implies the possibility of 'making' history-a category opposed
to history in just the same way that the tragic is. Goethe sees the
latter, too, in Napoleon-in his downfall.
In March 1832, shortly before his death, Goethe speaks with Eck-
ermann about "the Greeks' tragic idea of fate." It is, he says, no
longer in conformity with the contemporary mode of thought. He
does not even shrink from comparing this to fashion: A tragedy, he
says, is a costume that has long since gone out of fashion. What has
taken the place of the tragic in characterizing human existence in one
of its extreme possibilities? Certainly not something that could have
been defined by the religious ideas of the time; these are no doubt
mentioned only because they exclude ~ idea of existence-the ancient
one - that was not founded on the principle of freedom, but instead
had permitted the determination [of a person's fate] by delusion and
the fateful incurring of guilt. Napoleon appears as exemplary in relation
to this change. Goethe's last utterance about his demonic partner in
his [process of] self-constitution is sobering, especially in its foreignness
to aesthetic matters. It anticipates what was first to become fully
manifest as a result of Goethe's death, because he had himself delayed
it so long: the politicizing of literature, in the contemporary form of
"young G ermany. "
For Napoleon had not only declared, but had also for the first time
made it possible for people across the Continent to experience the
fact that life destinies-and precisely not only dynastic or soldierly
ones - are determined by political acts. In the moment of this last
conversation Goethe remembers what Napoleon had said to him in
the alcove of the castle at Erfurt and what, in spite of his experiences
after J ena, he could hardly have accepted at the time. Now it is the
limiting formula for all aesthetic endeavors: "We moderns are now
more inclined to say, with Napoleon: Politics is destiny. "22
For the substance of literature, he says, that means nothing, because
this proposition cannot be understood, in the manner of the "most
recent writers," as meaning that, as a result, politics, too, is already
poetry, or a suitable subject for it. As a subject it is always spoiled by
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the partisan attitude that the poet has to adopt if he wants to have a
political effect. His materials have nothing to do with the obligations
and restrictions that characterize political affairs. The poet is "like the
eagle who soars above countries, and to whom it is all one whether
the hare on whom he swoops down is running in Prussia or in Saxony."
The poet, not the emperor, is the eagle.
On Manfredini's commemorative medal for the battle at Jena, which
Goethe had described in his diary on the occasion of his inspection
of the battlefield, while the emperor's portrait had been on the front,
Jupiter and his eagle had been represented on the back.23 There Na-
poleon was not yet Prometheus, Jupiter was not yet his enemy, the
eagle was not yet the torment that ate at his liver.
In the meantime Goethe knows that a generation has grown up in
whose eyes his activity "is considered worthless, just because I have
disdained to involve myself in political divisions." To satisfy these
people, of the type represented by Uhland, he would have had to
"become a member of a Jacobin club and preach murder and blood-
shed. "24 Goethe would not have forgotten the resonance of the saying
about politics as destiny even if he had not had a chance to become
aware, in the divergence of his life from those of his contemporaries,
how much Napoleon had carried his point against him in the remainder
of his lifetime. It is his problem-and his antithetical position: "The
people always want me to take sides too; very well, I am on my own
side. "25 That was the overall outcome already of his refusal to respond
to the demands of the young generation in the rebellion against Na-
poleon-or to the expectations of his friend, the duke.
When Goethe visits the house of his friends, the Korners, in Dresden
at the end of April 1813, he has, according to the memoirs of Ernst
Moritz Arndt, "neither hope nor pleasure in the new developments";
instead, he rebukes both the son, a Liitzow fusilier f and singer of the
liberation struggle, and the father, "as though enraged." " 'Go ahead
and rattle your chains, the man is too great for you, you will not
break them.' "26 When Napoleon, by then already fallen, was violently
criticized in his presence, Goethe, according to an account of Varn-
hagen's, initially held his tongue but then, "with an austere calmness,"
said: "Leave my emperor in peace!"27 Was it on account of his nature
that Goethe refused the engagement of the patriots, or did his bond
with Napoleon prevent him from entering into their enthusiasm? Heine
sees in him the "great genius for rejecting its own age" that "is its
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Part IV
own final purpose." That is why "an age of enthusiasm and of

deeds ... could not use him. "28
But Goethe not only refused to participate in the patriotic rebellion
against Napoleon, he had also refused his services to Napoleon himself,
as soon as it was a matter of more-or should one say less?-than
the exchange of looks. Here, there is the invitation to come to Paris
and write a drama about Caesar. According to the memoirs of the
Chancellor Friedrich von Muller, that was a proposition of the highest
order, of the most marked distinction, but also having the clearest
relation to the emperor's pretension and consciousness of himself:
"Tragedy should be the school of kings and of peoples, which is the
highest thing the poet can achieve. You, for example, should write
the death of Caesar in a manner fully worthy of the subject, more
magnificently than Voltaire. That could become the finest task of your
life. One would have to show the world how Caesar would have blessed
them, how everything would have turned out entirely differently, if
people had given him time to carry out his high-minded plans. Come
to Paris, I positively demand it. There is a wider view of the world
there! There you will find an abundance of material for your literary
creations. "29 Napoleon's invitation occupied Goethe, according to the
chancellor's testimony, "very actively for a long time after that." He
made no "great statement" on the subject, any more than he did
about the whole audience [with Napoleon]. He allowed the offer to
be frustrated by incidental "inconveniences." To allow himself to be
made a political instrument was not within his definition of himself.
When Napoleon asked him to dedicate an account of their meeting
in Erfurt to the Czar Alexander, he evaded the request: He had never
done that sort of thing, he said, so as not to have to regret it later.
Napoleon insists that the great writers of the age of Louis XIV acted
differently. If we may trust Talleyrand's account, which is the only
one that reproduces this part of the conversation, Goethe answered
fearlessly: "C'est vrai, Sire, mais Votre Majeste n'assurerait pas qu'ils
ne s'en sont jamais repentis" [That is true, Sire, but Your Majesty
would not affirm that they never regretted it]' 30 A great answer. It is
this double refusal that legitimates Goethe in later refusing to join the
emperor's opponents and the triumph over him.
Napoleon utters the saying about politics as destiny in the context
of his remarks about classical French tragedy, not only in order to
dismiss the category of the tragic but also to reoccupy its 'position'
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in the historical system with the category of the political. This saying
has been repeated to the point of producing boredom. It soon sounded
like a call to everyone to participate in taking the place of what had
formerly been fate-to put it briefly: to make history. But Napoleon
could not have meant it this way in talking to Goethe; it only becomes
possible to mean it this way when the place of this single subject of
history has become vacant. When he said it, Napoleon had before
him a man of whom he knew that "destiny" had only stricken him,
without having been made by him or even merely having been some-
thing that he could have made. Goethe, for his part, accepted the
'reoccupation' of the position of tragedy only much later, only with
his resignation at the very end. Ultimately, it had been Napoleon who,
by the aftereffects of his actions, had forced everyone to adopt the
saying that he had meant entirely differently, that is, as referring to
the passive affectedness of those who are subordinate. When Goethe,
in the last conversation that has been handed down to us, from March
1832, endorses Napoleon's saying, he intenupts his discussion of this
(to him) unbearable and yet unavoidable topic: "But not another word
on this wretched subject, so that I don't make myself irrational by
combating the irrational."
Politics as destiny-that meant originally, and for Goethe always
meant (in view of Napoleon), politics acting like destiny. Even the
interruption of his literary influence at the end appeared to him only
as the pressure of a higher power, not the power of something higher.
Nevertheless one has to say that Goethe understood, with a unique
affinity, the indifference of the powerful person to the consequences
of his making of history. To the onlooker this affinity lies in the shared
distance of both the aesthetic and the political vis-a.-vis their own
contemporaries, and this in the perspective of the great disregard for
the petty sphere of the human that seems to derive from the con-
sciousness of the contingency of being contemporaries. To make history,
to subjugate it [to oneself] as son1ething that can be made, can also
be based on an attitude of uninvolvement [Gleichgultigkeit1.
Thus, with Chancellor von Muller, on March 6, 1828, Goethe COlnes
to speak of the conqueror of Napoleon. It is absurd, he says, to reproach
Wellington for his striving for power; one should rather be glad t ha t
he had finally received the position that was appropriate for hirn. It
\vas surely legitimate, now, for one who had conquered India and
Napoleon to rule over a paltry island. And then, by two intern1cdiate
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steps, Goethe comes back to himself: "He. who possesses the highest
power is right. One must bow down before him respectfully. I have
not lived so long in order to concern myself about world history,
which is the most absurd thing there is; whether this or that person
dies, this people or that one perishes, is all the same to me; I would
be a fool to concern myself about it."3l To compare oneself to the
conqueror of Napoleon- as his conqueror oneself, if only a conqueror
in the exchange of looks - surpasses the sequence of self-comparisons
with the emperor. The terrible fascination of an indifference [Gleich-
giiltigkeitl that the poet is only able to simulate aesthetically, but which
he once credited himself with, as a doer of mental deeds, in his
comparison of himself with Prometheus, has found its formula.
We could consider ourselves fortunate if the Weimar schoolmaster
Johann Daniel Falk were more reliable, because then we would have
a report of Goethe's utterances about Napoleon from a time in the
immediate vicinity of the meeting in Erfurt. On October 14, 1808,
which is the date Falk gives for his conversation with Goethe, the czar
had arrived in Weimar. What Falk reports is informative on account
of the aesthetic parallel: " ... Goethe suggested that Napoleon directed
the world according to pretty much the same principles by which he
directed the theater. He found it quite normal that Napoleon has a
ranter like Palm or a pretender like d'Enghien shot in the head, so
as once and for all to deter the public-which cannot wait out the
time, but interferes troublesomely everywhere with the genius's cre-
ations-by a striking example." Napoleon becomes a metaphor for
the way in which Goethe, as theater director, was accustomed to
dealing with his audience. Falk immediately lets his account go over
into direct speech: "He is contending with the circumstances, with a
spoiled century, in the midst of a spoiled people. Let us count him
fortunate, him and Europe, that he himself, with his grand colossal
world plans, is not spoiled. "32 The man who had wanted to draw
Goethe into the world of the French theater emerges, for him-ahvays
only on the condition that we can trust Falk's account-as an out-
standing representative of this theater-world. He takes "everything
completely seriously, even the French theater, which, with its Roman
characters and its great maxims, necessarily attracts him like a sort
of regents' school, and has to attract a spirit like his .... Napoleon
sits just as attentively before Caesar as if he were presiding over a
criminal trial." This can hardly have been invented, since it is consistent
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with the reliable report that there had been conversation between
Napoleon and Goethe about Voltaire's Cesar and the possibility of a
nevv drama about Caesar. The destiny that politics was henceforth
supposed to be was, in its original model instance, a theatrical authority.
Was the 'primal scene,' the meeting in Erfurt, also a theatrical scene?
That is a question that one does not easily get free of, as is always
the case when what is at issue is the difference between reality and
the stages of its disappearance, or its negations. Was Saint Helena the
first reality? For Nietzsche, I may remind the reader, Goethe was "a
convinced realist," and it was to that convinced realist that Napoleon,
at their encounter, was supposed to have presented himself as "that
ens realissimum." That personalizes his want of reality, as Nietzsche, in
his search for repetitions of the Renaissance type, would naturally do;
but the personalization was after all, no doubt, only necessary and
convincing for Goethe because it was under this name and proceeding
from this will that reality had suddenly caught up with him. What is
real is always only what is not, or is no longer, unreal. If I wanted to
express this in a different language from my own, I would have to
say that the reality principle is always effective only to the extent that
the pleasure principle has already successfully installed its world of
wish fulfillment. That was uniquely the case with Goethe; the Pro-
methean's own special world had set up its idols without any resistance
in the hermetically protected sphere of Weimar. How else could his
glimpse into the abyss of the necklace affair have been able to induce
such dreadful presentiments?
The indication that points most clearly, in this context, to the theme
of "realism" is the dating of his marriage to Christiane to the day of
the battle at Jena and the plundering of Weimar. This day had made
Goethe experience, and experience in the person of Christiane, what
"realism" meant when one's life and personal world were at stake.
She defended the helpless Olympian, with a fortification made of
things from the kitchen and the cellar, against the mad-for-plunder,
out -of-control soldiers. The Dutchess Luise was to demonstrate the
same thing, on another plane, the next day, by courageously standing
up to the conqueror. By doing so she also, incidentally, saved the
office and the livelihood of Goethe, the minister of state. 33
Goethe came to terms with these realities only reluctantly. Chris-
tiane's name is missing fi-om his diary on October 14, \vhere, after
"Burning, plundering, terrible night," we read, in a forced impersonal
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construction, "Preservation of our house. through steadfastness and

good luck." Whose? Who had the one and who had the other? And
on the following day the extent of his responsibility is again charac-
teriz.ed quite clearly, although the new fixed point is, at first, only
indistinctly recognizable: "At court on account of the kaiser's arrival.
Went home. Occupied with securing the house and the family." The
actual date of the marriage ceremony in the palace church is October
19. In the diary we find only the single word: "Trauung" [marriage
ceremony]. It is evident that two years later, when Christiane succeeded
in pushing Goethe to travel to Erfurt and thus to meet Napoleon, she
only completed what had begun on the day of [the battle of] Jena.
She embodied the reality to which Goethe had-so much as a matter
of course-refused to give himself. Reality turns out to be that which,
in an aesthetically conceived life of exclusively internal consistency-
a self-created life with Promethean pretensions - breaks in, as some-
thing foreign, from outside. The presence of Christiane in his life was
also a reality, which, while he had of course brought it about, he had
not himself 'created,' one that he would have had to take upon himself
and that he was not prepared to take upon himself even against the
influence of his mother. He accepted her at the moment "when he
saw that the self-created world in which he dreamed and wrote his
poetry was not the real world at all. "34
Napoleon's instantaneous and conclusive appearance [momentane
Evidenz], as a reality that put in the shade every prior aesthetic reality,
dates from J ena, not from Erfurt. From this point of view, Erfurt is
already a piece of reestablishment of identity: The new ens realissimum
turned out to be one that had read Werther seven times and that
wanted to prevail on its author to write a new work. The refoundation
of this identity is already a retraction of the crudest 'realism.' The
sa ying that was coined in view of the battlefield of J ena, that only a
god could withstand a god-which had been nothing but a way of
expressing futility, since there was no god to be found who could be
summoned up against this god - now becomes the image of a limiting
case that is already approached by one who is able to hold his own
against the gaze of the omnipotent one.
Up until Napoleon's intrusion, Weimar had been, for Goethe, the
epoch of the identification of aesthetic fiction with the form of his life.
Access to power, through his influence on Carl August, had enabled
him to set up a world according to his design and his will, a world
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in which, amazingly enough, his rules of the game were accepted, as

they were in the theater. No one has ever been able to tailor so much
to his own measure the external reality in which he has to live. The
accounts of those who approached this sphere from outside or entered
it give an impression of uncomprehension, consternation, an eerie
feeling.
Karl Ludwig von Knebel, who had arranged Goethe's first encounter
with Prince Carl August of Weimar and had thus become a founding
figure of the Weimar world, gives an account, in a sketch for an
autobiography, of Goethe's arrival in Weimar in 1775: "He still wore
the 'Werther' get-up, and many followed his example in their clothing.
He still had some of the spirit and the manners of his novel in himself,
and this was attractive. Especially to the young duke, who thought he
could thereby achieve spiritual kinship to his young hero. Many ec-
centricities went on at the same time that I don't· want to describe,
but which did not give us the best reputation in the outside world.
Even so, Goethe's imagination was able to give them a shimmer of
genius. "35
In his Briefe eines reisenden Franzosen iiber Deutschland an seinen Bruder
zu Paris [Letters of a traveling Frenchman about Germany, to his
brother in Paris], which appeared anonymously in 1784, a certain
Kaspar Riesbeck reports on Goethe's appearance in Weimar: "In every
area he advocates-as a matter of principle-what is unadorned, nat-
ural, conspicuous, daring, and fantastic. He is just as much an enemy
of the civil police as he is of the rules of aesthetics. His philosophy
borders pretty closely on Rousseau's .... When the feeling of his genius
awoke in him, he went about with a brimless hat and unshaven, wore
a quite peculiar and conspicuous costume, and wandered through
woods, hedgerows, mountain, and valley on a path that was entirely
his own; his gaze, his gait, his language, his staff, and everything
declared an extraordinary lnan. "36
And the indiscreet archaeologist Karl August Bottiger writes about
this phase: "Goethe the genius could not capture his 'world spirit' (a
vogue word of the time) in a nan'ow 'sweat hole' (vulgarly, a to\vn).
Bertuch had to relinquish his garden next to the park to him, and
there he set up his genius's housekeeping. A certain community or
property created a resemblance between the geniuses and the Quakers
and Heilandsbriidern [Moravian Brothers)' ... During the 'genius' period
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Part IV
anyone who did not want to trample on order and decorum was called
a philistine. "37
To be sure, the storm and stress had worn itself out since then,
especially since the travels in Switzerland and to Italy. Battiger noticed
that, too - that Goethe returned from a journey altered each time,
"entirely metamorphosed"; but that was simply in accordance with
the fact that he departed on such a journey precisely because the
consistency of his artificial world could no longer be maintained un-
broken: "In general, \vhenever things began to get doubtful in a period,
Goethe always·escaped by means of a journey.... " But in those days,
just as today, travels did not confront one with reality-certainly not
with one's own reality-but are rather a device by which to find what
will permit one to recover the daluaged coherence. This time a journey
was not sufficient to enable Goethe to master the crisis of his self-
created world, although he had the idea in mind - in a lachrymose
state in which Heinrich Voss the younger, the teacher of his son,
August, described him as being in the days after Jena. To Voss, Goethe
had been "an object of the most heartfelt sympathy in those sad days":
"I have seen him shed tears. Who, he cried, will relieve me of house
and court, so that I can go far away?"38 He thought-if one cannot
call it traveling this time-of flight. That allows us to infer what Chris-
tiane accomplished: to put him face to face with reality. The fact that
Goethe had not been able to marry her was also part of his deficiency
in realism, which characterizes his relationship to women in general.
A married genius, a Prometheus with a family, that would in truth
have been an impediment in this Weimar world, which seemed to be
prepared to accept any illusion.
Goethe considers himself the great experience of every woman with
whom he came in contact. That is why it was so important to him
that at least one of these women, Lili Schanemann, confirmed for him
in their later years that he had actually been this. Her son, Wilhelm
von Tiirckheim, visited him on the very day of the battle of J ena.
Otherwise, Goethe had permitted himself every imaginable illusion.
When, in May 1 7 74, the Kestners' first child arrives, he is the godfather
and considers it entirely a matter of course that Werther's Lotte must
want the child to be called Wolfgang. He writes this to the father,
too, completely without embarrassment, even saying that he wants
the child to have his name "because he is mine. "39 He seems not to
ha ve taken cognizance of the fact that the child did not receive his
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name; nor of the fact that none of the subsequent Kestner children
was named Wolfgang. The episode stands here as an indicator of the
fact that the confusion of tactlessness with freedom rests on a deficiency
in his relation to reality.
The relationship with Frau von Stein was carried on, on Goethe's
side, in a completely imaginary manner. She reclaimed and destroyed
all the letters that she had addressed to Goethe. We possess his romance
with her in the form of his letters. Thus he made literature, for himself,
of his relations with women, but wherever the reality did not want
to harmonize with the coherence of the story, he did not allow it to
impinge on him. That-we need to realize here-is how powerful the
closure of his world was against what was not anticipated, not neu-
tralized by aesthetic means, in it.
Goethe's weakness vis-a.-vis reality did not escape even admiring
women. It manifested itself as a susceptibility to being disturbed pre-
cisely by the elementary realities. Henriette von Knebel, the sister of
Goethe's friend, made the remarkably clear-sighted observation that
in this Weimar, "where life springs from pulsing veins and action and
productivity rise to the highest efforts," one was not permitted to
speak of dead people or of death. She generalizes this, in regard to
Goethe, into the statement {which sums up this aspect [of our subjectD:
"But in the so-called enjoyment of his full life, nothing is permitted
to disturb him.' '40 One can confidently take that as a definition of the
level from which the imminently impending experiences, the great
interruption and agitation caused by Napoleon, the days of Jena and
Erfurt, depart.
Only this consideration allows us to approach, once more, the ques-
tion what the 'content' of that conversation on October 2, 1808, may
really have been, if it obliged Goethe to exercise so much restraint
in revealing details. Goethe acts as discreetly as if he were the guardian
of a mystery. But was he really? Was there in fact more there to
relate than what his associates had already extorted from him? My
thesis is that, seen from the point of view of its 'content,' this con-
versation had no importance. Or, to put it differently, that any content
had to be unimportant in comparison to the sheer fact of this con-
frontation and of Goethe's holding his own in the face of the 'dis-
turbance' that culminated in it.
Goethe himself once admitted that his memory left him in the lurch.
The context in which he does this is significant. Napoleon made him
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Part IV
laugh, he tells Boisseree, in fact so much th~t he felt he had to apologize

for it-but he is "no longer able to say what it actually had to do
with. "41 We seldom hear of a Goethe who laughs, just as, in other
cases as well, it is fitting for gods not to laugh. But that he should no
longer have been able to remember the cause of his slip, only seven
years later, is only credible if it was so insignificant that it would have
had to embarrass him. And what he wraps in the cloak of 'significance,'
which stimulates so much curiosity, will have been the same.
Chancellor von Muller reports that on June 9, 1814, Goethe was
angry at what had been related after Napoleon's first departure into
confinement on Elba; the French general, Koller, will have told the
truth about that just as little as he, Goethe, had told it about his
interview with Napoleon. He had never "told it candidly." But why
not? Nothing is less convincing than what Goethe adds on that subject:
" ... so as not to promote endless gossip. "42
What Goethe avoided when he kept silent was what we would call
demythologizing. One who demythologizes runs the risk of having
nothing left when he is done. Or of having only that formal limit-
value that Bultmann, working on the New Testament, called the ke-
rygma, which is absorbed, sooner than anywhere else, in the prop-
osition-which says everything and nothing-that "I am the one" [Ich
bin es). If one applies that, without blasphemous exaggeration, to
Goethe's confrontation with Napoleon, then one is immediately struck
by the symmetry that arises on both sides of the front. For Napoleon,
too, had a momentary experience of evidence, when he said of Goethe,
after the latter's exit, laconically but unsurpassably: "Voili un homme!"
[There is a man!].43 On Goethe's side, the most convincing statements
are those that are able or that attempt still to communicate the 'in-
divisible' [punktuelle1 impression [that Napoleon made on him]. Eck-
ermann transmitted Goethe's most concise and forceful formulation
with regard to Napoleon, which itself concludes with a claim to ex-
haustiveness in its treatrnent of its subject: "He was something [Er war
etwas]' and one saw by looking at him that he was, that was all. "45
How did this remark come about? Eckermann tells Goethe that on
the previous day he had seen the duke of Wellington arrive at the
inn in Weimar, on his way to Petersburg. Goethe asks for an account
of what he saw, and Eckermann provides it in a manner that is full
of admiration, and with the unmistakable aim of finding the adequate
formula for the un repeatable singularity of what Schiller had once
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Chapter 3
called, in a letter to Goethe, the "total impression." He says, "And

one only needs to look at him once, never to forget him, he produces
such an impression." The way Goethe reacts to this shows immediately
that he has to deplete the power of the other's experience in order
to prevent the uniqueness of his own experience from being diminished.
It sounds almost derogatory: "So you have seen one more hero ... and
that always signifies something." There were rows of heroes of this
rank, even if in Weimar they were only seen in transit. This act of
leveling off unfailingly leads to Napoleon, whom Eckermann has to
regret never having seen. " 'Of course,' Goethe said, 'that was also
worth taking the trouble. That compendium of the world!' 'He must
have looked like something?' I asked. 'He was something [Er war es),'
Goethe answered, 'and one saw by looking at him that he was; that
was all.' "
This "that was all" still holds even now, almost two decades later,
for the promise that Goethe had already given Riemer on October 4,
1808: "About the Erfurt events. His meeting the emperor. That he
would write down what he discussed with him. He, as it were, dotted
the 'i' for him." No, there was nothing more to say beyond this "He
was something."
Only this shrinking of the momentary evidence to its atom on eidos
[indivisible form] gives it empirical incontestability. No defeat, no ab-
surdity, no disclosure of the real terrors that had been inflicted on the
peoples could extract Goethe from this constellation, which he had
entered when he regained his identity. After Napoleon's fall he main-
tains a loyalty whose price was alienation from his contemporaries,
who were breathing sighs of relief at their release.
Napoleon saw in Goethe the author of Werther, the prospective
creator of an imperial theater; Goethe approaches Napoleon's downfall
from the point of view of the theater, summoning up his old art of
unreality as a means of self-defense. In the Tag- und JahresheJte [Daily
and annual notebooks, later published as A nnalen, Annals] for 1815,
he describes in detail events in his theater in Weimar, which had just,
"at this epoch, reached the highest point attainable by it." The distance
and the impersonality of the language make it easy for hiln to "go
out from the restricted boards of the stage to the great arena of the
world," making a transition to Napoleon's last coup, seen as a theatrical
effect: "Napoleon's return terrified the \vorld; \ve had to live through
a hundred days that \vere pret,'Tlant \vith destiny .... The battle of
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Part IV
Waterloo, which was reported in Wiesbaden, to great terror, as being

lost, was then announced, to surprised-indeed dizzying-joy, as having
been won.' '45
The word we, which implicates himself, is withdrawn at the end.
But above all, the emperor who, in Erfurt, had anticipated a Death of
Caesar by Goethe, a more noble one than Voltaire's, has himself, as
the adventurer of the Hundred Days, become a theatrical figure, at
least in metaphor. Boisseree already had the suspicion that the audience
in the governor's palace at Erfurt had been a great theatrical production
intended by Napoleon to impress the author of Werther, but that the
latter had either not noticed or not wanted to notice the artificiality
of the display.46
Saint Helena is the reduction to the hard core of reality. The picture
of the humiliated and finally dying emperor is, for Goethe, the terrible
application of the saying about politics as destiny to its author. Only
in this connection does it become clear that his continual relating of
himself to Napoleon had not only been self-exaltation. When, in No-
vember 1823, he is taken ill with a severe convulsive cough that forces
him to pass days and nights in his armchair, Eckermann asks him one
morning how he feels: "'Not quite as poorly as Napoleon on his
island,' was the groaning answer."4 7
At the beginning of the year 1830 the mortal illness of the grand
duke's mother causes him to remember her courageous confrontation
of Napoleon after the battle of J ena. Goethe falls silent for a while
when he calls to mind this scene, a scene that had rescued the continuity
of his existence together with the continuance of the state on which
it depended. But his sympathetic recollection concerns the man on
the rocky island. The terrors of Jena and thereafter seem to fade, in
view of the humiliations of the prisoner, which can be exhibited in
an external circumstance. Goethe mentions the emperor's worn dark-
green uniform, which, for lack of appropriate cloth on the island,
could not be replaced and finally, at Napoleon's request, had to be
reversed. "What do you say to that? Is it not a perfectly tragic feature?"
So the tragic quality did still exist after all, and in fact not as the
antithesis of politics but as its consequence. As though to confirm that
theory of tragedy, Goethe is prepared to feel pity: "Is it not moving
to see the master of kings at last reduced to such a point that he has
to wear a uniform that has been reversed?" But this time Goethe does
not overlook the "terrible man": "And yet, when one considers that
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such an end struck a man who had trodden on the life and happiness
of millions, then the fate that befell him is after all still very mild; it
is a nemesis that cannot avoid still being a little considerate, in view
of the greatness of the hero. "48
The reflection concludes with a 'moral' that cannot, after all, make
up its mind to make the moral realm into a standard against which
to measure Napoleon: "Napoleon gives us an example of how dan-
gerous it is to elevate oneself into the absolute and to sacrifice everything
to the carrying out of an idea." Dangerous, here, is a vague term, the
least definite one that could have been found. Whatever danger of
downfall may always have been close to it, to make the demonic
phenomenon or allow it to be made into a moral one is something
that Goethe does not permit himself or others. That will be what he
meant when he responded, already, to the news of Napoleon's ab-
dication-by which, to the surprise of those who were present, he
was "somewhat unpleasantly affected"-by saying that he had not
esteemed or loved Napoleon so much as he had regarded him "as a
remarkable natural phenomenon." The "natural" quality here is not
so much a justification as a withdrawal from moral characterization.
Goethe once praised Victor Hugo's poem "Les deux lies," where
lightning struck the hero from thunderclouds below him. That, he
said, was the way it happened in the mountains. 49
In this regard Goethe had reached far ahead of his experience when,
still before the defeat at jena, in an action that he himself saw as
singular, he had opposed the moralization of the phenomenon of
Napoleon. This earliest expression of an opinion regarding the ap-
proaching danger of a colossus needs to be recounted. Goethe was in
Jena in order to unpack a shipment of rocks from Karlsbad just when
the Prussian Colonel von Massenbach wanted to have a manifesto
against Napoleon printed. The printer and others were afraid of the
wrath of the approaching conqueror and tried to persuade the grand
duke's minister to intervene. The publication was "nothing less than
a moral manifesto against Napoleon," Goethe remembers, which one
could easily have translated into an expression of the "vexation of a
deceived lover at his unfaithful mistress," but which, as such, was "just
as ridiculous as it was dangerous." As only a document of the dis-
appointment of great expectations could be: Napoleon had not per-
formed what one had expected of him, "when one fancied it necessary
to irnpute moral and human objectives to this extraordinary Inan. "50
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Part IV
A document, then, not so much of politi<;:al opposition as of miscal-

culation in regard to the true nature of this phenomenon. Goethe is
able to prevent the proclamation from being published; one single
time he transgresses, as he himself says, the law that he had given
himself "not to meddle in public disputes." Thus the demonic proclaims
itself by compelling him to decree a state of emergency permitting
exceptions to his own rule of life. The farewell to Prometheus becomes
serious. Goethe's personal aesthetic world can no longer be kept free
from the inroads of the reality that is alien to it.
Finally he found in the figure on the rocky island the confirmation
of the fact that the role of Prometheus had been definitively taken
from him and brought by another, beyond its aesthetic quality, to an
end. We have Riemer's precious notes from March 8, 1826, in which
the convergence of the two great lines under the names "Prometheus"
and "Napoleon" is attested. "Why does he do penance?" Goethe asks,
looking back at Saint Helena, and goes on: "What did he bring men,
like Prometheus?" The answer is not unambiguous, but begins, with
evident deliberation, with an "also," to wit: "Also light: a moral
enlightenment." The forced heir of the Revolution has moved back
into the century he came out of.
Goethe, too, seems here to think the thought, which was current
at the time, of the cunning of reason g in history when he makes the
demonic man who cannot be evaluated morally into the enlightener-
against his will and without his knowing it - of the peoples. He did
not 'teach,' but he 'showed': "He showed the people what they can
do .... " He revealed the inadequacy of the rulers whom he defeated,
and made it "an object of each person's consideration and interest"
to deal with "man's status as a citizen, his freedom and what affects
it: its possible loss, its preservation, its assertion." If Goethe the Hegelian
existed, he would have to be hidden behind this memorandum of
Riemer's. Napoleon the suffering Prometheus and also Prometheus
the bringer of light, with the finest effect of any conceivable enlight-
enment, which Goethe ascribes to him with the formula: "He made
each person attentive to himself. "51
This convergence is as far from being accidental as can be imagined.
Because as early as Pandora the figure of the ruler-by-force had adapted
itself to the zone of the Prometheus myth. For the year 1807, in the
Daily and A nnual Notebooks, he notes as "the most important under-
taking" what he had contributed to a 'muses' almanac' founded in
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Vienna, a journal that according to Goethe's statement should be

called Pandora but actually carried the title Prometheus, and which does
contain a dramatic fragment [by Goethe], PandoraYs Return, in 1808.
Goethe takes this opportunity to acknowledge that "the mythological
point where Prometheus appears has always been present in my mind
and has become an animated fixed idea. "52 This was evidently the
main reason not to refuse his participation in an undertaking with
this title, although he had not even been able to retain [the manuscript
of] the "Prometheus" that had been so close to him.
Goethe's sliph is not incidental, because something became possible
for him, under the name of Pandora, that Prometheus's name did not
allow: a transformation, just as violent as it was beneficent, of the
original mythical sense of the gift of the gods, which he no longer
allows to cause mischief. Because their gifts are entirely withdrawn
from the criterion of external beneficence. What had so far held his
Weimar world together also had to be able to give durability to the
wider reality in its disturbance. At the beginning of the year 1807
Goethe said the Weimar librarian Karl Ludwig Fernow, whom he had
met in Rome where Fernow was giving lectures on Kant, that now
"Germany has only one great and sacred object-to hold together in
the spirit, so as, in the universal ruin, to preserve most jealously the
still uninjured palladium of our literature, at least. ... "53
Prometheus can only return by being bound into a configuration
that, in view of external impotence, does not allow aesthetic self-
mastery to appear as a sheer illusion, but rather as the beneficial
opportunity to renounce precisely the illusions of the dependence of
happiness or unhappiness on external circumstances. The name of
Prometheus now designates only one aspect of a reality whose am-
bivalence, either mastered or to be mastered, can most easily be
characterized, with the catchword of these years, as "balance."
This had already become apparent when, in his great birthday poem
for his duke, "Ilmenau," in 1 783, Goethe had once again included
the Prometheus figure, with a changed pretension. In a conversation
with Eckermann on October 23, 1828, he himself interpreted this
poeIn and said that it contained, "as an episode, an epoch that in
1783, when I wrote it, already lay many years behind us, so that I
could sketch myself, in it, as a historical figure, and carryon a con-
versation \vith myself as I \vas in earlier years."
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The visionary appearance of his own self in the nocturnal forest

landscape brings about a combination of distance with uninterrupted
identity. It expresses the "grave thoughts" that brought with themselves
nothing less than "attacks of regret for various kinds of mischief that
my writings had caused." He shows the duke what emergence from
the Sturm und Drang period really meant to his friend: above all, the
loss of the concept of aesthetic-creative immediacy, which admitted
no hiatus between will and work, work and effect, pretension and
reality. This becomes the new problem of Prometheus, which gives
the figure a tendency to converge with that of Napoleon, with the
"natural phenomenon" that makes history, that is not able to keep
its effects identical with its actions, its making with what it makes.
The independence that the effect gains, vis-a.-vis the work, is ex-
pressed for the first time, in "Ilmenau," through Prometheus, and
probably could not be said in any other way except by appealing to
this name. It is no longer the conflict with Zeus, the forcible insistence
on his own world, as against the already existing one, that is brought
out in Prometheus, but rather the elemental difference expressed in
the verses:
"Und was du tust, sagt erst der andre Tag ... "
[And what you accomplish, only the following day reveals ... ]
We see a new element in the old myth, that of the unconsciousness
in the production of man that prevents Prometheus, in his workshop,
from knowing what kind of a future and history he is preparing there-
because he has unavoidably to abandon his creatures to themselves.
It is the paradox that history is made, but is not something that one
can make.
That is the great disappointment, that the origin, intention, and
ingredients do not decide the fate of what one produces:
Liess nicht Prometheus selbst die reine Himmelsglut
Auf frischen Ton vergotternd niederfliessen?
Und konnt er mehr als irdisch Blut
Durch die belebten Adem giessen?
[Did not Prometheus himself make the pure fire of heaven flow down
into fresh clay, making it divine? And could he pour more than earthly
blood through the quickened veins?]
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The poet is still Prometheus, but Prometheus the helplessly chained

demiurge, far from his creatures, for whom even heaven's fire is not
able to ensure the success of the provision that their creator makes
for them:
Ich brachte reines Feuer vom Altar;
Was ich entziindet, ist nicht reine Flamme.
Der Sturm vermehrt die Glut und die Gefahr,
Ich schwanke nicht, indem ich mich verdamme.
[I brought pure fire from the altar; what I kindled is not pure flame.
The storm increases the heat and the danger; I do not hesitate as I
condemn mysel(]
Only when one puts "Ilmenau" before it does it become compre-

hensible that the reanimation of the Sturm und Drang myth of Pro-
metheus in Pandora could not take place apart from the Napoleon
experience. In the operalike primeval scenery of the play, Prometheus,
confronted with the other Titan, Epimetheus, is no longer the potter
who makes man and brings him light, but the despiser of his own
gift to men. The gesture of defiant independence with respect to Zeus
and the nature that belongs to him has been transformed into the
tyranny of a harsh drudgery imposed on smiths, herdsmen, and war-
riors by this Titan's brutal authority. His tools and weapons dominate
the field. On the side of Epimetheus are the meditative, reflective,
and pleasure-seeking people, as well as the suffering ones. But Pandora,
whom Prometheus had scorned, they have not been able to keep with
them either. Both Titans are now old, and the story of their distant
youth has become myth - a story that is also the poet's past and, as
is still the case with every past, cannot be left to itself in forgetfulness.
One has to 'work' on it, if it is to continue to be adaptable to life as
It goes on.
In the process, Pandora becomes the great reoccupation of the pri-
meval 'layout of positions' that the Prometheus dramatic fi-agment
and ode had set up. The migration of the earliest form of culture, the
original hut, for which Goethe had once decided bet.ween the classical
columned hall and the Gothic arch as the original pattern, is significant.
Now on Prometheus's side there is only the cave, either natural or
artificially excavated-while the hut belongs on Epimetheus's side. Its
description sounds like a formula of reconciliation for that old argulnent.
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It is "a serious wooden structure of the o~dest style and construction,

with columns made from the trunks of trees." The consequence of
this reoccupation is that Prometheus's demiurgic realm can no longer
be identified with the beginning of culture. The Prometheus world,
this combination of caves and work, has become a crude and coarse
underworld, for which the possession of fire and the working of iron
that it makes possible are only the preconditions of naked deeds of
violence and of the harshest drudgery.
One theme of the "Prometheus" ode continues in the new config-
uration too: the immovability of the earth. But its solidity is now
reliability and resistance at the same time. Thus the song of the smiths
at their forges 'celebrates' it:
Erde, sie steht so fest!
Wie sie sich qualen lasst!
Wie man sie scharrt und plackt!
Wie man sie ritzt und hackt!
[The earth stands so firm!
How it lets itself be tortured!
I-Iow we scrape and flatten it!
How we scratch and hack it!]
The ancient principle of terra inviolata [inviolability of the earth] shines
through, in view of the enormity of the powers that are required in
order to extract the means for making tools and weapons from what
is inviolable. The smiths' verse ends with the unique lines:
Und wo nicht Blumen bliihen,
Schilt man sie aus.
[And where flowers do not bloom,
We bawl them out.]
There is no longer a triumph of the demiurge. He is not the author
and protector of men, but their taskmaster. The song of the smiths
ends with an allusion to the theft of fire; but now it only signals
subjection: to do the work quickly and stir the fire because he who
brought it rightly demands that it be used.
This constellation compellingly demands the next and most im-
portant reoccupation: The father is no longer Zeus, against whom the
man-making potter rebels, but Prometheus himself, against whom
there is no longer any defiance, but to whom all power submits:
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Chapter 3
Sieht's doch der Vater an,

Der es geraubt.
Der es entziindete,
Sich es verbiindete ....
[After all, the father is watching,
He who stole it.
He who kindled it
and bound it to himself.... ]
Prometheus did not bring fire to men as a favor, but bound it to
himself as a means by which to exercise his power over them-he
took command of the prerequisite of their survival. Even if the smiths
call Prometheus the father, the position of the son is now filled dif-
ferently: by Philerus, who, in the plan of the work (which was not
carried out), represents, together with the daughter of Epimetheus and
Pandora,54 the next generation, which no longer faces the primeval
dilemma of defiance or submission. Enthusiasm for the sons' defiance
has disappeared.
But they too begin with violence. Epimetheus has to rescue Epimeleia
from Philerus's clutches. He has a different paternal role from that of
Zeus in the early ode. He has to resist the foreign force that Prometheus
cannot restrain in his own son, although he threatens him with the
chains with which Zeus had had him fettered on the Caucasus:
Denn wo sich Gesetz,
W 0 Vaterwille sich Gewalt schuf, taugst du nicht.
[For where law and paternal will have provided themselves with force,
you are no match for them.]
What once appeared as Zeus's exercise of arbitrary power against the
creative race of Prometheus and his men has now become the taming
coercion of legitimate power, which alone is able to arrest the original
savagery of new species. Now Prometheus asserts for himself, without
reflection, what h~ had once proudly and defiantly disregarded. When
Philerus begs him to loosen his grip, and promises that his presence
will be respected, Prometheus demands a more comprehensive sub-
mission, one that continues in his absence as well: "A good son honors
his father's absence."
On the other side of the stage there is no need to extort by force
what Prometheus the son, in the Sturm und Drang period, had contested
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Part IV
above all and in every case, when Epimeleia says to Epimetheus after
he has rescued her from the hands of Philerus: "Oh, you father! After
all, a father is always a god!" When Epimeleia and Philerus are supposed
to be thought of, at the end of the play, as being united as the ancestors
of future generations, their mode of life will be based on (in the first
case) the confirmation and (in the other case) the successful application
of paternal power. The principle on which myth is constructed, the
repetition of prototypical patterns as the ritual of reoccupation, de-
termines the way Goethe reaches back to his youthful theme of the
conflict of gods.
The cave is a demiurgic space. Insofar as it is a way of screening
off everything natural and everything organic, it is the space both of
shadows and images-as in Plato's myth-and of the manufactured
world of technical products, in the widest sense. Endless industry is
the requirement in the caves belonging to Prometheus, who now sees
that something entirely different and unexpected has arisen from the
preservation of the human race that he brought about: something
radically one-sided that goes beyond all the requirements of self-
preservation. Even the rocks, which are knocked down by means of
levers in order, through the process of smelting, to multiply everyone's
strength a hundredfold as tools, are not allowed to resist being com-
pelled to be useful. Prometheus praises his smiths, after their chorus,
for having preferred to everything else the one element that belongs
to their underworld. Such "partiality" befits the active person:
Drum freut es mich, dass, andrer Elemente Wert
Verkennend, ihr das Feuer tiber alles preist.
[Therefore I am glad that, not appreciating the value of other elements,
you praise fire above everything.]
Vulcanismi has assumed the form of the reorganization, pushed forward
by human hands, of stuff that accumulated in the Neptunist manner-
stuff that taken by itself, without the influence of light, air, and water,
represents only naked sterility. 55 The renunciation of the light of day,
the turning of one's gaze into the caves, to anvil and fire, is a way of
warding off all distraction, an unrelenting hard life of demiurgic
concentration.
Remember that Goethe wanted to write an allegory of doing without,
to describe a world in which, after Pandora's disappearance and before
her return, the divine is not present. The origin of fire in heaven has
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Chapter 3
been forgotten, and a new realism in the assessment of man defines

the scene. Gifts from a higher source, the mere lights of the Enlight-
enment' are nothing to this race of troglodytes. From the caves come
the means employed in exercising power; the scarcely tamed fire of
the forges becomes the power to destroy huts.
It is the world in which Napoleon had become possible and would
soon meet Goethe. In Pandora, the Titan is drawn as a Napoleonic
figure. Long before Napoleon will become Prometheus, Prometheus
would have become Napoleon. True, he does not call to arms, but
his decision is contained in what one of the herdsmen objects to the
smiths:
Doch nah und fern
Lasst man sich ein,
Und wer kein Krieger ist,
SolI auch kein Hirte sein.
[But near and far, people meddle, and he who is not a warrior should
not be a herdsman either.)
Prometheus is guided by this appeal in instantly converting the smiths'
production:
Nur zu Waffen legt mir's an,
Das andere lassend, was der sinnig Ackemde,
Was sonst der Fischer von euch ford em mochte heut.
N ur W affen schafft!
[Make weapons your only object, for me, abandoning other things-
whatever the thoughtful tiller of the soil or fisherman may want from
you today. Make only weapons!]
The reason for this-which sounds strange coming from the mouth
of the potter who, having made man, was barely able to keep his
creatures alive - is the tightly packed overpopulation of the earth.
Thus, with an explicit reference to the fact that this is the creator
speaking to his creatures, they are challenged to struggle for existence,
to gain preponderant power (some of them) over others:
Drurn fasst euch Wacker, eines Vaters Kinder ihr!
Wer falle? stehe? kann ihln wenig Sorge sein ....
Nun ziehn sie aus, und alle Welt verdrangen sie.
Gescgnet sei des \vilden Abschieds Augenblick!
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Part IV
[So make yourselves brave, you children of one father! He cannot be

much concerned about who falls and who remains standing.... Now
they are taking the field, and they are ousting everyone. Blessed be
the moment of the fierce departure!]
Goethe's reinterpretation of Pandora - the most violent of his re-
castings of myths - is guided by the fundamental idea that everything
that happens in her absence and with the transient license resulting
from her hiddenness becomes an episode. The recasting tends toward
the pattern of a 'philosophy of history. ' The extremes of man's potential
are revealed in reality only as a result of loss of power by the su-
perhuman agency that alone could force them together. In this interim
the Titans, Prometheus and Epimetheus, are not equally capable of
becoming a ware of the wa y they are confined by their role in an
episode. It is only the contemplative partner who perceives what they
are deprived of. This is not a perception that is universal among
mankind. It is only for that reason that the increase of power can
remain dynamic, dazzled by its progress. Prometheus's children and
servants, the smiths, warriors, and herdsmen- the demiurgic, martial,
and driving fundamental types of the vita activa [active life]- depend,
it is true, on Pandora's return, but they do not know this, they cannot
acknowledge der Liebe Gliick~ Pandorens Wiederkehr [the happiness of
love, Pandora's return]. The "demonic" is still entirely in force as the
industriousness that prevents one from recognizing any limits. Pandora's
remaining away conditions this world and is conditioned by it. Her
return would be sheer surprise, that is, a mythical and not a historical
event. The proceedings that men go through with themselves cannot
give her a point of entry. The rubric over her return is: "Gabe senkt
sich, ungeahnet vormals" [The gift descends, unsuspected in advance].
Could Goethe demonstrate this conversio [conversion], or does every-
thing, in the leap into myth, remain just the business of the gods?
The conclusion of the first part, which alone was completed - but also
what we know about the second part-leaves that an open question.
Contrary, however, to everything that is left undecided, is the single
dramatic event of the play: the self-judgment of Philerus, who, having
injured his betrothed, Pandor(;l's daughter, in a rage, hurls himself
into the sea. Philerus' s fall and his rescue are framed by the peculiar
doubled allegory of the appearance of the false and the true dawn.
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Chapter 3
While Prometheus is seeking to console his brother, who is inconsolable

on account of Pandora, and directs his attention to what he supposes
is the dawn, he suddenly realizes what is really happening there: There
is a fire in the woods and in the homes of men. It is the same fire
that the Titan brought to them, and that he knew in its strength only
from the smiths' forges.
This is the moment in which the thoughtful Epimetheus, in his
soul's suffering, fails, while Prometheus is able to bring his violent
troops quickly to the center of the fire. Before they wage war in distant
lands, they are still to be helpful to their neighbors near at hand. The
song of the warriors celebrates the Prometheids' indifference between
destruction and protection, between a looting expedition and an ex-
pedition of assistance. But in what is so much a matter of indifference
to his followers, Prometheus recognizes something new. It is not only
the desired Dienst der H ochgewalt [service of great power] but also some-
thing appropriate to his mythical character: "Und briiderlich bringt
wiirdge Hilfe mein Geschlecht" [And my race, in brotherly fashion,
provides worthy help]. After the mere illusion of dawn, Eos [Dawn]
may now really break, in order, with her first glance over land and
sea, to perceive Philerus's fate and report it to his father. The father
wants to restore the self-condemned son to life by the demiurge's
quick artifice. Eos prevents him from doing this, because it is only by
the will of the gods that a metamorphosis of an unsuccessful life into
a new one can succeed. When Eos keeps Prometheus from exercising
his un sanctioned will, a break with the Prometheids' Titanic past be-
comes possible and the union with Epimeleia, to establish a post-
Titanic mankind, is ushered in. In comparison to the apotheosis of
Philerus, it was only an incidental twist that Prometheus sent his violent
followers to his brother's aid; but the episode prevents Eos's keeping
him from reviving his son from forcing upon him the same quietism
that is the permanent condition of his brother's waiting for Pandora.
This ambiguity is also evident in the conclusion, where Eos sends
the father of men away. On the one hand, this is a changed Prometheus,
who expresses a loss of pleasure in the demiurgic enterprise and an
inclination toward his brother Epimetheus's mode of existence.
Neues freut mich nicht, und ausgestaltet
1st genugsam dies Geschlecht zur Erde.
[New things do not delight me, and this race is adequately equipped
on earth.l
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Part IV
The realism of palpable usefulness, whi<;:h had emerged from the

smiths' caves, has suddenly changed into melancholy over the losses
that every day has undergone in what it no longer is and, in relation
to its expectations, can no longer be. Prometheus's resignation is Epi-
methian, distrustful of the cheerfulness of the generation whose de-
velopment he has forced:
Also schreiten sei mit Kinderleichtsinn
Und mit rohem Tasten in den Tag hinein.
Mochten sie Vergangnes mehr beherzgen,
Gegenwartges, formend, mehr sich eignen,
War es gut fur alle; solches wiinscht ich.
[So they stride, with childish thoughtlessness and with rough trial and
error, into the day. If they would take past things more to heart and,
shaping, appropriate present things more, it would be good for every-
one; such things I would wish for.]
It is a wish for the unification of the divided Titanic tribes.
This reformed Prometheus does not have the last word. Fading Eos,
who has to yield to Helios [the sun], speaks it. Eos has still been able
to disclose to Prometheus the vision of the rescue from floods and
fire of the Titans' children, who are sure to receive the gift from the
heavens that their fathers' going astray had compelled them to do
without. Here, the principle of pure grace, embodied in Pandora's
return, governs:
Gleich vom Himmel
Senket Wort und Tat sich segnend nieder,
Gabe senkt sich, ungeahnet vormals.
[Instantly, from heaven, word and deed descend, blessing; the gift
descends, unsuspected in advance.]
The principle of groundlessness rules. In every age it has led people
to expect that the new man would become a reality precisely when
every expectation was against him. The expectation is not followed,
here, by an emergence [of the new man], if only because Goethe failed
to connect the new to the change in Prometheus: Philerus's father
could still have punished, but could no longer have saved him.
So the last words that Eos combines with his "Fahre wohl, du
M enschenvater!" [Go well, you father of men!] are once again a warning
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Chapter 3
not to interfere in the new course of history. The meeting of man's

real needs should be left to the gods:
Gross beginnet ihr Titanen; aber leiten
Zu dem ewig Guten, ewig Schonen,
1st der Gotter Werk; die lasst gewahren.
[You Titans make a great beginning, but to guide (men) to the eternal
Good and Beautiful is the work of the gods; do not interfere with it.1
This is the con1plete revocation of what Goethe had once connected
with the name "Prometheus." The attempt to maintain an identity
on the strength of the antithesis of his original self-definition now
requires a predominant Pandora, and still more: a pantheon, an agency
of the separation of powers-in Goethe's new favorite word, of
"balance. "
It is obvious that Prometheus has no business in the plan of the
second and final part of the allegory. While that is not the reason, it
is certainly a symptom of the fact that, as I believe, we can consider
ourselves fortunate not to possess the second part of the play. Pandora's
realm, Wilamowitz once enthused, was identical with the Platonic
realm of the Ideas. Whether that is mistaken or correct, it can scarcely
give rise to a feeling of loss. Goethe still noted down the key words
symbolic fullness for Pandora's parousia, in which she was to arrive with
vintagers, fishermen, agriculturists, and herdsmen. What she brings
is exposed, with "happiness and comfort," to every presumption of
commonplaceness. At the end there are "Sitting demons. Science. Art.
Curtain"-but between Jena and Erfurt it was easier to speak of doing
without Pandora than of her return.
The sketch of the second part is dated May 18, 1808. It is under-
standable that a mere five months later the poet whom Napoleon had
asked for a Death oj Caesar no longer found these notes vivid and no
longer felt a relation to a Platonic gift from the gods. The fact that
Pandora remained a fragment is itself indicative: There \vas still no
relief for Prometheus. In the outline there is no further reference to
him. So the expedient is to make the resigned Prolnetheus disappear
from the tableau.
To have his identity rescued by the tyrant was not, of course, \vhat
Goethe wanted either. Since the Weimar life-world could not, in fact,
be preserved through the crisis-what \vould he have \vanted, \vhat
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Part IV
would have been his alternative to the days. ofJena and Erfurt? Goethe
gave his answer when, in May 1814, HIland, the director of the royal
theater in Berlin, approached him, as the "foremost man of the German
nation," to contribute a festival play for the celebration of the triumph
of the allied monarchs over Napoleon. Des Epimenides Erwachen
[Epimenides's awakening] was first performed on the anniversary of
the entrance into Paris.
Goethe assigns to Epimenides a different gift from Pandora's, the
gift of sleep:
Da nahmen sich die Gotter meiner an,
Zur Hohle fiihrten sie den Sinn end en,
Versenkten mich in tiefen langen Schlaf.
[Then the gods came to my aid. They took me, in contemplation, to
a cave, and sank me in deep, lasting sleep']
Sleep is the extreme form of a voidance of reality, of the reduction of
its demands, so as to protect an identity against history's invasion of
the protected sphere of a self-created life. It is not the experience
of reality but rather sleep in the cave, as the extreme figuration of
an unmolested, screened-off state-made aesthetic perhaps by its
dreams - that is the "inexhaustible source of wisdom." It is the gods
who grant the privilege of sleeping through the crises of history:
Zeiten, sie werden so fieberhaft sein,
Laden die Gotter zum Schlafen dich ein.
[In times that will be so feverish, the gods invite you to sleep.]
While the gates before Epimenides's resting place are still being closed,
by genies, the distant thunder of war can already be heard. It is only
a thin disguise for the history that he has just experienced without
being granted the favor of sleeping through it, when Goethe makes
the campaigning army appear in the "costumes of all the peoples
whom the Romans had first conquered and then used as allies against
the rest of the world." Here, too, Goethe conceals himself; if defeated
peoples had to appear, then let them at least be those who were
defeated by the Romans. His "predilection for what is Roman," which
he once explained as the result of his having had a prior existence
under Hadrian - his liking for "this great intelligence, this order in
every aspect of life ... "56 - was something that this time he could only
show indirectly.
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Chapter 3
While history takes its tum on the stage, Epimenides dreams of his
past or of his future. With the approach of the army on campaign,
the Napoleonic character appears, the "demonic" in figura [personified],
the demon of war itself. His "delight," he says, is when "the countries
round about quake" [beben, as in Erdbeben, "earthquake"]. Even with
this deepest-lying and oldest of his metaphors, Goethe does not say
what he [privately said that he] saw: "the progress of a demigod from
battle to battle and from victory to victory. "57 But still he lets it be
known that he does not see the renewal as something forced upon
Europe by the [previous] destruction, but rather sees the destruction
as a precondition of the renewal. In the light from the devastating
conflagration, he has the demon proclaim that the field is free for a
creative command:
Ein Schauder iiberlauft die Erde,
Ich ruf ihr zu ein neues Werde.
[A shudder runs through the earth; I call to it a new 'Become! 'j]
What is contrary to his whole experience is the poet's operalike

wish fulfillment that the demons appear while he sleeps - and perhaps
only dreams them. Them, and the shocks undergone by the earth,
which can be so ambiguous in their significance only in this dream:
representing the downfall of an existing world and the transition to
the terrors of the interim, but also the emergence of a new constitution
of reality. With the doubled earthquake, Goethe reduced the impact
of his lifelong anxiety about the stability of the ground. Not only the
sleeping temple priest Epimenides is a self-representation, but also
the demon who appears in the form of a courtier. Who else should
possess the faculty of sensing the imminent earthquake?
Ich fuhle sie wohl, doch har ich sie nicht;
Es zittert unter mir der Boden;
Ich furchte selbst, er schwankt und bricht.
[I know I feel it, but I cannot hear it; the ground trembles under me;
even I fear its pitching and breaking.]
To this sensitively attentive demon, even the colulnns of the telTIple
seem to sense the earthquake and to make it advisable for hinl, sus-
picious of what still stands, to go into the open center, out of reach
of collapsing walls. Even the stage directions show the attitude to
history tha t the poet, if he cannot be the sleeper, after all, desires:
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Part IV
"At this moment everything collapses. He ~tands in silent, open-eyed

contemplation. "
How was the courtier able to have a presentiment of the earthquake?
We learn this, in the next scene, from the mouth of the demon of
oppression, who appears in the costume of an Oriental despot and
shows appreciation of the preparatory work done by the demon of
cunning. What has been created in the course of long years of freedom
cannot, he says, collapse all of a sudden, when the trumpet of war
sounds, but only if the ground has been carefully prepared for this:
Doch hast du klug den Boden untergraben,
So stiirzt das alles Blitz vor Blitz.
[But you have cleverly undermined the ground, and everything collapses
in a flash.]
One remembers what Goethe had written to Lavater as early as 1 781,
apropos of Cagliostro's intrigues, about the undermining of the moral
and political world and the preparation of its downfall.
The drama Goethe wrote, as in duty bound, for the celebration of
the liberation [of Germany from Napoleon], reveals in many ways the
poet's failure to join in his contemporaries' rejoicing, a failure for
which they were not to forgive him. Goethe showed them the basic
pattern in terms of which he understood the defeat [of Germany by
Napoleon]: The new kingdom of the virtues, which is proclaimed by
allegorical figures without great joy and in a scene that does not
compete, in texture, with those involving the Napoleonic figures, re-
quires a downfall to go before it. The return of happier circumstances
is based on the. same principle - the undermining of the ground on
which the Imperial intermezzo takes place-as was the earlier collapse
of the old world. Once again there is a secret alliance, a conspiracy
of virtue to produce this downfall:
1m Tiefsten hohl, das Erdreich untergraben,
Auf welchem jene schrecklichen Gewalten
Nun offenbar ihr wildes Wesen haben ....
Doch wird der Boden..gleich zusammenstiirzen
Und jenes Reich des Ubermuts verkiirzen.
lHollow out the deepest level beneath the earthly kingdom in which
those telTible powers now openly carryon their savage doings ....
But the ground will suddenly collapse and cut short that kingdom of
arrogance.]
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Chapter 3
It is the formula of all apocalyptic dreamers, that the old must

perish so that the new can dawn: "Die Welt sieht sich zerstort - und
fohlt sich besser . .. [The world sees itself destroyed - and feels bet-
ter . . .]. A genius summons Faith, Hope, and Love, softly to prepare
the way for Doomsday. It is the day of judgment for the demonic
conqueror:
Denn jenes Haupt von Stahl und Eisen
Zermalmt zuletzt ein Donnerschlag.
[For a thunderbolt finally pulverizes that head of steel and iron.]
What had boldly emerged from the abyss, the geniuses (sisters of the
virtues) sing, can, it is true, subjugate half of the world, but it has to
return to the abyss. The demonic, whatever violence it can inflict on
the world, in the end succumbs to the pull of its origin.
The problem with the play has to do with the plausibility of the
pairing of the disastrous and the promising downfall. Does not Goethe
subject his audience, which is jubilating over its freedom, to the irony
of all promises of salvation that depend on downfalls when he makes
the demon of oppression himself, emerging from the ruins of the
collapse that was prepared for him, utter the essential sentence of
every eschatological bringer of blessings: "Paradise has arrived!" Did
Goethe still want to avoid what it was, objectively, impossible for him
to avoid: that Epimenides, finally awakening, should nevertheless seem,
when he encounters "the wild chaos of creation," to have less con-
fidence in the rhetoric of this formula than in the terrible sign of the
comet that appears in the heavens? For he evidently takes the images
that passed in review before him while he slept in the temple for
reality, and what the geniuses with their torches now show him for
a "dream full of anxieties." Only when he goes closer, in the torchlight,
does he realize that during his sleep,
... ein Gott
Die Erd erschuttert, dass Ruinen hier
Sich aufeinander turmen ....
[a god shook the earth, that ruins are piled on top of one another
here .... 1
He recognizes that reality has had its history and that this has Inade
everything present strange to hiln:
Part IV
So ist es hin, was alles ich gebaut

Und was mit mir von Jugend auf emporstieg.
Oh, war es herzustellen! Nein, ach nein!58
[So everything that I built and that rose with me, from my youth
onward, is gone. If only it could be restored! No, alas, no!]
Even while it celebrates the victory over Napoleon, the play lets
one perceive Goethe's sorrow that, for him, the wish to sleep through
the dominion of the demons, in the role of the priest in the temple,
and to avoid the traumatic threat to the identity of the Promethean
ego, had not been fulfilled. He clearly consoles himself by making
Epimenides encounter the mirror-image difficulty of identity, the dif-
ficulty of dealing, after the fact, with the privilege of his history's
interruption by vegetation. The old tablets are broken and no longer
legible, and loud is the lamentation of the failure of memory. Only
one song still retains it, a song that has to be repeated by an invisible
chorus; it is like an incantation against all earthquakes:
Hast du ein gegriindet Haus,
Fleh die Gotter alle,
Dass es, bis man dich tragt hinaus,
Nicht zu Schutt zerfalle ....
[If you have a solid house, beseech all the gods that it should not
crumble into ruins before you are carried out of it.... ]
Epimenides is full of suspicion that the geniuses who accompany
him with their torches could be demons. But the old man is tom out
of his despair over not being able to bridge the lost time by the martial
music of the allied armies, which are drawing near. The painful scene
only reveals what the author is incapable of. From the repeated
"Hinan!-Vorwarts-hinan!" [Upward!-Forward! - Upward!] to the
laconic stage directions to the effect that the ruins are now erected
again and that part of the wild invading vegetation - memories of
Rome! - is left for decoration, he cannot conclude without making
audible some groans and creaks of dutiful patriotism. Finally Epi-
menides has to declare that he is ashamed of his hours of leisure and
that it would have been profitable to suffer with the others, who have
now become greater than him, as a reward for their pain. The poet
pays tribute to his triumphant contemporaries. But also to his own
dream, because he has Epimenides set straight by his attendants, who
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Chapter 3
object that by being preserved undisturbed he has been made capable

of a purer perception, and begins to resemble what the others could
only achieve in the future. In that case the wish-fulfilling dream would
already have accomplished what the age denied to the poet: to :know
himself to be, in the longed-for convergence, at least headed in the
same direction as his world, and in advance of it by the painful years
between the abysses and earthquakes.
Epilogue
Epimenides is crowded with demons who are not yet really instances
of the "demonic." Goethe will only gradually gain a more definite
grasp of the coloration of that phenomenon. What he will call demonic
in Napoleon, and for which he occasionally offers what are only vague
conceptual equivalents, belongs to the category of the mythical. By
this I mean to say only that it circumscribes-does not explain, perhaps
only gives a name to - a potency that has not been fully analyzed
historically. That may be chargeable to the weak judgment of one
fascinated individual. But a whole century of analytical and descriptive
elucidation of the phenomenon by historiography, which cannot tolerate
mythical qualities, leaves, as a remainder that resists the grasp of
theory, something of the kind that the poet at least gave a name to.
Goethe's bewilderment in view of something that he took to be nu-
minous is transformed into theory's disappointment that the center
of the phenomenon, the power source of its dominance, the derivation
of its energies and visions, has at bottom remained untouched and
undiscovered.
Precisely when science itself is not ready to accept-and could not
prepare people for- the narrowness of what is possible for it, the
digestion of such disappointments falls back on mythical delineations.
But the myth that theory thought it had suppressed or reabsorbed
has its underground presence: In the undated outline of the 'typical,'
the singularity that could not be cleared up at least loses its unfamiliarity.
Familiarity does not explain anything, but it makes it possible to deal
with this very fact. History can never have the familiarity of ritual.
Where its theory fails, where it remains speechless in the production
of comprehensible connections, and finally where contempt for it can
become an institution, the offer of mythicization always seems to be
present. Or can theoretical rationality itself employ a fundamental
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Part IV
pattern of myth, that of the repetition of ~he same? In that case this
would of course not yet be the effort of the concept, k but certainly
that of the type. The study of the half-ironic case with which this
epilogue is concerned shows the kind of processes - which are easily
mistaken for mythicization - that are natural in this situation.
In a single paragraph of a letter to Arnold Zweig, Sigmund Freud
described the incomparable event that had taken place in June 1936
on the occasion of his eightieth birthday. "Thomas Mann, who delivered
his lecture on me in five or six different places, was kind enough to
repeat it for me personally in my room here in Grinzing on Sunday
the fourteenth. "59 We can no longer make the scene - with this speaker
and this listener, at this most terrible time, in this most threatened of
all locations-present to ourselves in its pregnance. Part of this is also
the anything but coincidental fact that the one of them was in the
midst of his greatest epic work, the joseph tetralogy, which he had
already been writing for more than a decade, while the other was
working on the last of his speculations, and the one that would probably
astonish his contemporaries most of all: the book (composed of three
individual essays), Moses and Monotheism. Both were contributing, in
their own ways, to the myth of a mythless God, who tolerated no
images or stories around him.
One of the preconditions of this great scene of the spirit of the age,
which hardly had another scene comparable to it, is the relationship
to Nietzsche that both partners shared. Nietzsche's idea - directed
against all historical 'spirit' [Geschichtsgeist]-of the "recurrence of the
same" as the sole way in which reality occurs (a reality that was
supposed to be able to generate its meaning in itself) stood in the
background of their conception of the processes that mankind goes
through. Freud, to be sure, had from a certain point onward refused
contact with this thinker, but only because he knew that, and to what
extent, his thinking had been anticipated there. "In later years I have
denied myself the very great pleasure of reading the works of Nietzsche,
with the deliberate object of not being hampered in working out the
impressions received in psychoanalysis by any set of anticipatory ideas. "
In consequence, he had to be prepared to forgo all claims to priority
in the instances in which the philosopher's intuition had anticipated
the results of laborious investigation. 60
Thomas Mann had in fact begun to read Freud only in 1925, although
much earlier material points in this direction and The Magic Mountain
517
Chapter 3
exhibits resistance to the irrationality of a romanticized natural science.

His own remarks, and the signs of use in the edition of Freud's works
in his library, verify that Totem and Taboo was, for him, the most
important of Freud's writings. A marginal comment that he wrote in
Oskar Goldberg's Wirklichkeit der Hebraer in 1929 already gives the
formula for the recovery of myth from the political role for which it
had already visibly been drafted: "Freud's unreactionary emphasis on
what is primitive/unconscious/preintellectual. It cannot be exploited
for wicked purposes. "61 In the same year, 1929, Mann gives his first
public lecture on Freud, at the university in Munich: "Freud's Position
in the History of Modem Thought," where he uses Alfred Baeumler's
essay on Bachofen as his example of the opposite type, the "great
k' Bac.
'B ac. k ,'''1
Both the origins of Freud's Moses and those of Mann'sJoseph ultimately
go back to the opinions and speculations about the connection between
the psychic life of the individual and that of peoples that Freud had
presented for the first time in Totem and Taboo. As so often, it is the
simultaneity of intellectual developments that had been worlds apart
that seems to remove the moment of the Vienna meeting in 1936
itself from the realm of contingency and give it the quality of myth.
Almost at the same time as Totem and Taboo, Thomas Mann had
produced the first specimen of his mythicizing procedure of "allusion"
and suspension of time in Death in Venice, in 1911.
Now, there is also a "satyr play" to follow the scene in Vienna:
Freud's self-parody of its consequences. In November of the same
year, Freud writes to Thomas Mann about the pleasant recollection
of his visit in Vienna and about his reading of the new volume of the
Joseph story. For him, he says, this fine experience is past, because
he will no longer be able to read the sequel. But in the course of
reading the volume something had formed itself within him that he
would like to call "a construction." He does not take it very seriously,
but it has "a certain attraction" for him, "something like the cracking
of a whip for an ex-coachman."
The structure of the reflection is, evidently, as follows: If Joseph,
in Egypt, had found guiding principles for his life in the pre-imprinted
lnythical models of the patriarchal past, for whom could Joseph, in
his turn-after an appropriate phase of latency-have been the myth-
ical prototype, "the secret demonic lTIotor"? The ans\ver is: for
Napoleon.
518
Part IV
With the shortened procedure that he used successfully only with

his historical and literary patients, Freud analyzes, in Napoleon, a
Joseph complex invented specifically for this case. By way of the
'motor' of the unconscious, the principle of repetition propels [Napoleon]
as the superior strength-continuously operating, dangerously un-
dealt-with, always ready to burst out-of the life that has already
been lived, that is formed once and for all. For an onlooker like Freud,
positioned in Vienna in 1936, it is no longer only what the motives,
considerations, or plans of a historical figure were, but, above all, from
what underground or abyss it drew its energies that emerges as the
central problem of history.
The attribute of the 'demonic' surfaces here too when the secret
motor of the Joseph fantasy is 'divined' in Napoleon; but it is now
only an item from the literary vocabulary, a reminiscence of Freud,
the reader of Goethe. What is crucial is that this vague classification
of the phenomenon has to leave it in the neuter, and thus elevates
unfamiliarity to an element of its definition (similar, to that extent, to
Rudolf Otto's descriptive neuter terms, numinosum, auguslum, lremen-
dum, and jascinans), while only the giving of a name produces the
outline of and the initial possibility of dealing with something so strange.
One has again before one's eyes what stories that were attached to
names and extracted from names were once able to accomplish, since
in our new uneasiness in the face of what we have not mastered-
the exclaves of the unknown in a territory that is densely occupied
by science-they still have to accomplish it. In that sense Freud grasps
in his own work, in this late parody, precisely what the century at
the beginning of which it had begun had pursued the most, and had
to pursue the most, because it had forced open an entirely uncanny
dimension of 'sheer dependency.'
Freud developed four analogies that connect the first Napoleon-
in, as it were, a subterranean manner, or a subtemporal one, too-
with the biblical Joseph. Bonaparte's problem, in his childhood, was
that among a multitude of siblings, he had not been the first. But the
first, the oldest of the brothers, was named Josef (this is the way Freud
spells it). Corsica equips the privilege of the eldest son with an especially
strong sanction. Thus what is, in any case, difficult to deal with-the
forever insuperable human problem that not everyone can be the
first - was intensified even further. "The elder brother is the natural
rival; the younger one feels for him an elemental, unfathomably deep
519
Chapter 3
hostility for which in later years the expressions 'death wish' and
'murderous intent' may be thought appropriate. To eliminate Joseph,
to take his place, to become Joseph himself, must have been Napoleon's
strongest emotion as a young child. "m
N ow the founder of psychoanalysis arrives with one of its great
devices, the trick of "conversion" that was discovered in the Studies
on Hysteria. If one is already so hopelessly lost that one can only wish
for the death of one's rival, but cannot bring it about, then it is more
practical, psychologically, to reverse the spear. Since one cannot become
the eldest, that means to leap right out of the sequence of siblings
and seize the father's role, the exercise of which now requires love
instead of hate. Not only is the quantum of energy that has been
summoned up employed in a different manner; an entirely different
language is spoken. Since we possess testiIllony only in this later lan-
guage of indulgent brotherly love, the trick that is imputed to nature
becomes entirely a trick of interpretation. That someone is loved who
deserved love so little cannot come about naturally, and that in tum
must have fateful consequences. "Thus the original hatred had been
overcompensated, but the early aggression released was only waiting
to be transferred to other objects. Hundreds of thousands of unknown
individuals had to atone for the fact that this little tyrant had spared
his first enemy."
If the literature of his school had not 'forced' entirely different
blossomings of the art of interpretation, one would be tempted already
at this point to suggest that we are present at a self-parody on the
part of the master. But only the further connections of the Corsican
to the Joseph archetype free us from any doubt. The widow (young,
it is true, but nevertheless older than himself) whom the general has
to regard it as useful to marry has, to the delight of the analyst, the
name Josephine. However she may treat him and deceive him, through
the medium of her name he fastened to her a piece of his relationship
to his elder brother, and so even this weak character can be sure of
his unlimited indulgence and passionate devotion. What inevitability!
The inventor of psychoanalysis, addressing himself to a historical
subject, necessarily becomes a backward-facing prophet when he ex-
trapolates Napoleon's Egyptian escapade from the Joseph con1plex.
As far as the speculative configuration is concerned, Freud here falls
in with Kant, who enjoyed offering his friends, over dinner, the ex-
citement of daring prognoses about contemporary events. His "con-
520
Part IV
jectures and paradoxes" about military op~rations during the wars of

the Revolution were fulfilled, according to his biographer, Wasianski,
just as precisely "as his great conjecture that there was no gap, between
Mars and Jupiter, in the planetary system .... " Kant regarded the
news of Napoleon's landing in Egypt as merely a piece of the sleight
of hand that he admired in Bonaparte, intended to disguise his true
intention of landing in Portugal. 62
This shrewd error on the part of a great philosopher is only made
intelligible by Freud's explanation that for people at the time it had
to be impossible to gain rational insight into the actions "of that
magnificent rascal Napoleon, who remained fixated on his puberty
fantasies, was blessed with incredible good luck, inhibited by no ties
apart from his family, and made his way through life like a sleepwalker,
until he was finally shipwrecked by his folie de grandeur. "63 It is
obvious that the most incomprehensible of Napoleon's actions, precisely
because it is this, would be concealed in these formulas and extractable
from them. Napoleon had to go to Egypt. This is not the construction
of a convenient compliment for the author of joseph: "Where else
could one go but Egypt if one were Joseph and wanted to loom large
in the brothers' eyes?" All the reasons given for this undertaking "were
nothing but the willful rationalization of a fantastic idea."
The climax is not yet complete. Because Joseph had failed in Egypt,
he had to reestablish the conditions under which it became possible
for him to behave as though he had been successful in Egypt. For
this, again, a trick of conversion is sufficient: He had to treat Europe
as though it were Egypt, in order to be able to become the nourisher
of his brothers. "He took care of his brothers by making them kings
and princes. The good-for-nothing Jerome was perhaps his Benjamin."
Finally Napoleon becomes disloyal to his myth. He renounces the
servitude of attending to the archaic ritual. He becomes a 'realist.'
When he rids himself of Josephine, his decline begins. "The great
destroyer now worked on his self-destruction." The thoughtlessness
with which he does something that is not in his 'program' - the cam-
paign against Russia- is "like a self-punishment for his disloyalty to
Josephine." The great fictions driving from unconscious motives-the
'as if Egypt that is Europe, and the 'as if father of his brothers - are
torn out of their anchorage in the psychic prehistory.
That reads, I already said, like self-parody. But it is also a recip-
rocation of the ironic tone that Thomas Mann had given to his Joseph's
521
Chapter 3
repetitions of primeval history. The repetitions, which are embedded

in the security provided by primeval history, easily give up the seri-
ousness of those primeval stories, which, as it were, 'did not yet know'
that they were prototypical. Freud, too, in his vocabulary, does not
take the "classic antigentleman" Napoleon seriously-even though he
grants that he was "cut on the grand scale"64-because he is an imitator,
one who is fixated on his role and only for that reason (literally) falls
out of it.
Goethe's vacillation between fascination and condemnation had an
entirely different character. For him the uniqueness of the demonic
figure is not yet in question, not even as a result of the projection [on
it] of the ancient Titan. For Napoleon's convergence with Prometheus
is with a figure that has already been tom free of the myth, both
aesthetically and biographically. To be that figure himself was some-
thing that Goethe had to have previously given up on.
Translator's Notes
a. Goethe's wife.
b. The author has continued his discussion of the Goethe-Napoleon relationship, and made
more explicit what is involved in the key idea of "delegation," in "Mon Faust in Erfurt," Akzenle,
Feb. 1983, pp. 42-57 (on "delegation," see especially p. 44).
Co Goethe worked for years on a theory of color that he thought was needed in order to
correct a fatal flaw in the (by his time) orthodox Newtonian theory. It was published as Zur
Farbenlehre in 1810.
d. U-topia was coined from Greek roots meaning, literally, "no-place."
e. Nietzsche, Twilight if the Idols sec. 49, in The PortabLe Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New
York: Viking, 1954), p. 554.
f A member of the volunteer force led by Adolf, Baron von Liitzow, in the "wars ofliberat ion"
against Napoleon.
g. List der l'emunjl, a central concept in Hegel's philosophy of history.
h. FelzlLeistung, what the translators of Freud call parapraxis.
i. On Vulcanism, see translator's note c to part 2, chapter 1.
j. Or "Let there be!" (Fiat), as in Genesis.
k. A nstrengung des Beg rijJs , by analogy to Hegel's A rbeit df~ Begrijj.\, "work of the concept."
522
Part IV
l. Thomas Mann's "Freud's Position in the History of Modern Thought" can be found in his
Past Masters (I933; rptd. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 167ff.; original:
Gesarnmelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), vol. 10, pp. 256ff. Alfred Baeumler's "Bachofen
essay" was his lengthy introduction to Der My thus von Orient und Occident, eine Metaphysik der
alten Welt; aus den Werken von j. j. Bachifen, ed. M. Schroeter (Munich: Beck, 1926).
m. Freud to Mann, November 29, 1936, in Letters if Sigmund Freud (New York: Basic Books,
1960), p. 432. Subsequent quotations (one slightly revised) are from pp. 433-434.
4
Ways of Reading the
"Extraordinary Saying"
One who, like Knebel, trimmed the light too short, or even snuffed
it out, was never again permitted by Goethe to undertake this task.
-Note made by Karl Eberwein
When Goethe says to Eckermann that Napoleon provided an example

of "how dangerous it is to raise oneself into the absolute," he knows
that this utterance also applies to the dream of his own youth.) Napoleon
had finally dared what Goethe, in his metamorphosis as Prometheus,
had believed himself capable of: to make a world, even though a
world already existed. The fact that this - as world based on one thought
and cast in one mold - had, at one point, almost been achieved was
often sufficient to make it seem a matter of indifference that this world
had disintegrated again, and also to consider what it had cost. Despite
all the summoning up of terrors, this attitude can still be sensed in
Epi7nenides) Awakening.
Because Napolean had now really become Prometheus, right down
to being chained to the rock of Saint Helena- precisely the divine
type that Goethe had resigned himself to not being- his memory is
conjoined with the "extraordinary saying" in part 4 of Dichtung und
Wahrheit. The saying did not originate in this passage, but Goethe's
comparison of himself to Napoleon is consummated in it here, as the
mythical summation of their incomparable relationship and their unique
existential claims.
This is so because in the final part of Dichtung und Wahrheit, which
\vas just almost completed [before Goethe's deathJ, the "extraordinary
524
Part IV
saying" stands as the culminating point and the final proposition in

the development of the category of the "demonic." Here, because
the experience of that which seemed to enjoy only the impossible and
to "reject the possible with contempt" could be illustrated by Count
Egmont, Napoleon is not named. Goethe only indicates that during
the course of his life he has been able to observe the appearance of
the demonic a number of times, "sometimes near at hand, sometimes
at a distance."
When Eckermann had the manuscript of this part in his hands, he
pressed Goethe for final clarity. He noted the different character of
the last five chapters within the whole, chapters that are full of portent
in relation to what is to come in this life, rather than merely recounting
what was happening at any given time; in them one can perceive "a
secretly operative power, a sort of destiny, which tightens diverse
threads into a fabric that only future years are to complete."2 Two
days later, while dining with Goethe, Eckermann leads the conversation
to this "inexpressible riddle of the world and of life," the demonic.
Goethe confesses that things that cannot be analyzed by understanding
and reason are remote from his nature, but he has to submit to them
nevertheless. Napoleon, on the contrary, had been demonic in nature,
"to the highest degree, so that scarcely anyone else can be compared
to him."3 Eckermann's further inquiries do produce names, but they
do not clarity the relation between the demonic and the "extraordinary
saying." He is fascinated by the question of the power that demonic
people exercise over others, over the mass of people, and even over
nature; but he ignores the statements of the manuscript that he has
in his hands, to the extent that it concerns the overcoming of the
demonic beings themselves. Within the world, Goethe wrote, nothing
withstands them, not even the elements and certainly not the "com-
bined powers of morality"; but they are finally defeated "by the
universe itself, with which they have undertaken a contest. ... "4
This statement, which gives a surprising turning to the catalog of
the things that are overcome by the demonic by presenting it as itself
capable of being overcome, is separated by only a semicolon from
the immediately following introduction-which concludes the whole
development-of the "singular but extraordinary" saying, "Nemo
contra deum nisi deus ipse" [No one (can stand) against a god unless
he is a god himself]. In the closest possible connection to what has
gone before, Goethe says of the dictum that it may well "have origi-
nated ... in observations of this kind." This connection is all-important
if one does not want, while displaying speculative acuteness, to isolate
the saying, as always happens when one regards it as the motto of
the whole fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit. But it was not put in
that position by Goethe himself, nor was it put there with his approval.
It is quite surprising, when one considers the logical connection in
the text, that the saying here is neither purely monotheistic (by de-
scribing a counterposition, against God, as illusory), nor exclusively
polytheistic either (by setting up one god against another), but rather
has a pantheistic implication: Only the entire universe can prevail
against a demonic-divine nature, which is able to overpower every
individual power within this universe. The universe is the absolute,
which cannot be shaken, in its power, by what occurs within it. From
this point of view it becomes clear that the "extraordinary saying"
deals with equivalences that, by their type, are only possible in a
pantheon of the pagan kind, but that can at the same time be surpassed
with a limiting idea that introduces Spinoza's absolute, as a unique
magnitude, into the mythical context.
Whatever the saying may have meant initially or later on in the
history of its genesis for Goethe, the constellation in Dichtung und
Wahrheit that concludes its use determines it within the reference triad
of monotheism, pantheism, and polytheism. The balance sheet of his
survey of the Promethean destiny is drawn up- in a manner that aims
at reconciliation but does not obscure conflict-on the highest meta-
physical plane. From this point, one can confidently venture a retro-
spective consideration of the "origin" [of the saying], of which Goethe
does explicitly speak-which he would hardly do if he had taken the
saying over, from whatever source, as a fixed datum. The result of
such a consideration is that the question of a foreign and distant
derivation of the saying, whether it be Gnostic or Pietistic, mystical
or Spinozistic, becomes not only irrelevant but unintelligible in its
justification. If the saying had" originated in observations of this kind,"
that is, observations such as precede its pointed quotation at this point
in Goethe's self-presentation-who else should have made these ob-
servations, since they constitute, unmistakably, the uniqueness of
Goethe's life experience?
The complete manuscripts of this last part of Dichtung und J;1 l ahrheil
do not exhibit any lTIOttO provided by Goethe hi Ins elf. We can be'
confident that the choice of the motto 'was agreed upon by the three'
526
Part IV
administrators of Goethe's literary remain,s, Eckermann, Riemer, and

von Muller. No utterance of Goethe's regarding the motto can have
been known to the three administrators, or Eckermann could not have
written, in a letter to Chancellor von Muller of January 19, 1833: "I
have prefixed a motto to the volume that expresses the power of the
demonic and that Riemer completely approves of and considers su-
perior to those he sent to yoU."5
But what are we to think, then, of Riemer's testimony in his Mit-
theilungen, which first appeared in 1841 in Berlin, that during the
search for a motto for the third part of the autobiography he had
proposed this saying and Goethe had accepted the proposal?6 Must
we-having corrected his error in referring to the "third part" rather
than the fourth- reject the statement altogether, in view of the way
the sources point to the administrators as having determined the motto?
I think there is a weak probability in favor of the hypothesis that the
" extraordinary saying" could already have been under consideration
once before, and actually for the third part of the work. There we
read: "Care has been taken that the trees do not grow as high as
heaven" [or "into the sky"]. This is not, to be sure, the equivalent, in
German, of the" extraordinary saying," but in view of the developments
that conclude the third part it is, nevertheless, one possible interpre-
tation of that saying, if one takes the verb that is omitted from the
saying as being a 'contrary-to-fact' subjunctive. What Riemer had
already, unsuccessfully, proposed for the third part would then have
been approved, with his participation, for the fourth part. In spite of
the lack of further evidence for such a hypothesis, it seems to me that
because it would involve a smaller failure of memory [on the part of
Riemer], it cannot at any rate be excluded. It would then be the case
that Goethe made no decision about a motto for the fourth part, but
that he probably had previously included this suggestion of Riemer's
among the final alternative possibilities for the third part. The" extra-
ordinary saying" had become too impressive and too persistently pro-
vocative for Riemer, across a quarter of a century, for us to be free
to burden him with an excessive looseness in his recollection [of these
events].
It had been Riemer who had heard the saying for the first time,
and in the simply original situation, from Goethe's mouth. It was May
16, 1807, after the inspection of the battlefield of jena, a day when
Goethe was in a bad humor on account of politics and on account
527
Chapter 4
of ... dogs barking. After a meal with the Frommanns, a stroll around
the town, and, in the course of that, those "jokes out of Zinkgraf"7
The note duplicates itself, or else the second mention of Zinkgraf for
this day refers to a different time of day: "Idle talk with Goethe.
Drawing on Zinkgrafs Apothegms." Riemer does not note down who,
in the middle of the talk, quoted the definition of God from the
collection of sayings: that he is "an unutterable sigh, at the bottom
of people's souls." Presumably this came from Riemer, who was versed
in quotations. Otherwise he would not go on to say: "Goethe cited
another one .... " I think that this transition was misread by the editor
of Riemer's diary. For Goethe does not "cite" [anfohren] at all; rather,
he "connects" [arifUgen] another saying [with the one just quoted]. On
the basis of Riemer's later assignment of the "extraordinary saying"
to Zinkgraf, it seemed too self-evident that Goethe could only have
been "citing." Philologists are in any case easily inclined to believe
that something could only have been "cited." But what we are dealing
with here is a scene of purely oral communication, and there it is not
quite so easy to say "cited." That is, after all, precisely the reason
why, in his Mittheilungen iiber Goethe much later, Riemer turned a
conversation ambulando [walking] into a scene of reading, with
"hundreds of sayings and aphorisms"-a scene that certainly pre-
supposes a different situation from that in the original note.
So the transition to the 'first performance' of the "extraordinary
saying" does not necessarily require that Goethe too meant to quote
from Zinkgrafs collection of sayings when he now says, "Nihil contra
Deum, nisi Deus ipse" [Nothing (can stand) against God unless it is
God himself]. This is, of course, Riemer's way of writing it. Whence
did Riemer, ambulando, know the correct way to write the saying
down? Did Goethe explain this for him? Surely not, since the one
time that Goethe himself included the saying in his works, he had it
printed differently.
Only in 1841, in the Mittheilungen iiber Goethe, did Riemer unam-
biguously undertake, without the uncertain connection in the note in
his diary, to assign the saying to Zinkgraf Now he speaks above all
of the impression that, among hundreds of sayings and aphorisms,
this one made upon him: "All at once I had a presentiment of boundless
applications .... " The reason why he claims to have proposed the
saying as the motto for the third part of Goethe's autobiography is
to be found in this impression. The claim need not be unjustified if
528
Part IV
the dating of the note to the year 1807 cannot be maintained; it must,
Scheibe thinks, have been "written down a considerable while after
Goethe's death."8 But Scheibe's attitude to the importance of the
"extraordinary saying" is not without a peculiar aspect. His requirement
that the saying must be eliminated, as the motto to the fourth part,
from a critical edition of Dichtung und Wahrheit, is certainly fully justified,
but his conclusion from this, that the saying "consequently loses its
outstanding importance," is simply incomprehensible. 9 This importance
is after all surely determined by its position in the text, and could not
be increased by one iota if Goethe himself had chosen the sentence
as the motto too.
Even if the saying had been taken from the source referred to, or
any other, a much greater material importance would have to be
assigned to the question of what was the disposing factor that put
Goethe in a position to adopt this one in particular among those
hundreds of aphorisms. The only comparably important question is
how he understood the saying, and wanted it to be understood, the
first time he used it-so that we could investigate whether his inter-
pretation of it was constant or changed. With such an ambiguous
image, and considering that his dealings with it extended over such
a long period of his life, it cannot be assumed that from the first
moment of its discovery or invention a fixed interpretation was, and
remained, present.
If we can take it as a premise that Riemer's diaries are more authentic
and more reliable than the M ittheilungen that he produced a decade
after Goethe's death, then a note that dates from the year 1807 (no
day being indicated), containing a remark of Goethe's that "must be
assigned to a time in the vicinity of the sixteenth of May,"IO deserves
special attention: "A god can only be balanced by another god. That
a power should restrict itself is absurd. It is only restricted, in tum,
by another power. This specified being cannot restrict itself; instead
the whole, which specifies itself, restricts itself, precisely by doing so-
the individual being does not." II If one assumes that something is
expressed in this for which Goethe sought a more pregnant-or a
most pregnant - formula, then the resulting interpretation of the final
form of the thought, which immediately leaps out, is governed by the
indefinite article associated with the substantive god. In the way in
which Riemer always writes the "extraordinary saying"-but in which
it is precisely not written in Goethe's sole authorized version, in the
529
Chapter 4
manuscript of Dichtung und Wahrheit-the capitalization of Deus excludes

the indefinite article. The reading that takes it as God's name and
thus as expressing personal identity would then be given as a matter
of course, with the result that interpretation could not avoid the path
leading to a monotheistic mysticism: "Against God, only God himself."
An intradivine dissension, a division at the foundation of the divinity
such as is described by Jakob Bohme, would then be suggested-
unless, interpolating a contrary-to-fact subjunctive, one produces the
formula of resignation: "Against God only God himself (could be and
accomplish something)." But precisely this sort of reading is excluded
when Goethe pronounces talk of a power that restricts itself absurd.
Absurdity designates the limit that is set to paradox.
As a paradox, the saying does hit the nail on the head in relation
to Goethe's "bad humor" on the day when he walked over the bat-
tlefield of Jena, and also in relation to his solution to this bad humor,
since the next morning he begins dictating the Wanderjahre. a With this
his period of flagging energy, which had begun about 1802-1803
(above all after Schiller's death and his own serious illness), comes to
an end. It is well known that Goethe had thought it possible that his
creative powers were exhausted. This phase of depression and doubt
is the end of his self-figuration in Prometheus. Everything points toward
and augurs a willingness to delegate the role to another person, whose
influence he will perceive on the battlefield ofJena, but whose altered
importance for himself he was only to grasp more than a year later.
The saying, then, marks the solution of a life crisis, a solution that
is able to renounce the Promethean status in favor of the idea of
balance, which was to find its poetic expression in the same year,
already, in the characteristic scenic symmetry of Pandora. Let us not
forget with what asymmetry aesthetic rebellion had presented itself
in the neighborhood of the "Prometheus" ode:
Mir geht in der Welt nichts tiber mich,
Denn Gott ist Gott, und ich bin ich.
[Nothing in the world outmatches me,
Because God is God, and I am 1.)12
For that very reason, the failure of the Promethean self-definition can
be described by the reading of the saying that makes it say that
"Against a god, only a god (could have rebelled)." After the dark
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Part IV
period of the five years from 1802 to 18Q7, this is acquiescence in no

longer laying claim to the status of a Titan.
The Titans in Pandora represent the new principle of 'balance,' the
deeply polytheistic fundamental idea that the restricting counteraction
must always be a different power. It is the mythical principle of the
separation of powers. But it is also the pantheistic possibility of rec-
onciliation, which sees everything individual and each particular power
as, in its tum, a specification of the whole, which restricts itself in the
process of realizing itself. Spinozism is not replaced by polytheism,
but tied to it as its manner of both aesthetic and historical self-
presentation.
The idea of balance appears again in connection with the "extra-
ordinary saying" after Goethe's relation to Napoleon had taken its
turning, and in fact in such a way that he can now relate his life
metaphor to this relation as well. Again, it is Riemer who notes the
mention of the saying, on July 3, 1810, in the evening after dinner.
"Nihil contra Deum, nisi Deus ipse. A magnificent dictum, with endless
applications. God always confronts himself; God in man again confronts
himself in man." Singled out from among the "endless applications,"
that appears as the monotheistic version, a conception that is most
nearly a personalized one, remote from nature pantheism and at least
not excluding the idea of the Incarnation. For the moral follows hard
on its heels that no one has reason to have a low regard for himself
in comparison to the greatest, since, if the greatest falls into the water
and cannot swim, "then the most miserable Hallore pulls him out. "13
From here Goethe makes the leap to applying the principle to his
encounter with Napoleon, to the 'equality' that had become manifest
in it: The man who conquered the entire continent "does not find it
beneath him to converse with a German about poetry and the art of
tragedy-to consult an artis peritum [one skilled in the arts]."
The situation that, in the formula at J ena, had still contained the
unreality [Irrealitat: the 'contrary-to-fact' status] of "balance" as [the
reason fod resignation from Promethean claims has become, as a result
of the encounter in Erfurt - in an unexpected constellation with the
"demonic"-the reality of an equilibrium. Thus Goethe's personal
experience with Napoleon becomes a specification, an application, a
manner of appearance of the universal world-principle: "So divinely
is the world arranged that each in his position, in his place and at his
time, balances [gleichwagt (balanciert)J everything else." It is the formula
531
Chapter 4
of a new self-consciousness, which had resulted from his standing his

ground against the Corsican's gaze-the description of a separation
of powers based on a situation corresponding to the fundamental
pattern of polytheism.
Here it is quite logical that what had first been pronounced apropos
of the scene of the fateful defeat is now repeated and transformed in
regard to the overcoming of this fate by this one individual. The secret
harmony between Goethe's early Spinozism and his aesthetic polythe-
ism is maintained in his use of the "extraordinary saying." Because
the legitimation of equality in the encounter in Erfurt is no longer
that of individual divinities, but rather of universal divinity. The po-
lytheism of the schema remains in the foreground: There is a god,
and whoever means to oppose him or even merely to stand firm
against his gaze must already be 'another god.' It is no longer aesthetic
self-empowerment, but rather a laying bare that resulted from having
lived through being faced with something entirely alien.
It is true that Riemer, again in his late M ittheilungen, said of himself
in 1807 that he "had a presentiment of boundless applications" of
the saying. But the entry in his diary fromJuly 3, 1810, puts it beyond
doubt that this is not, in fact, his formulation, for, according to this
entry, Goethe characterized the "magnificent dictum" as having
"boundless applications." This cannot be unimportant. If the saying
had merely been ambiguous [vieldeulig] from the first, it would not
only have been daunting for any attempt at interpreting it, it would
also have emptied the object that was being examined of its meaning.
Unless those "applications" came from Goethe's carrying the saying
with him through his own experience, and were enrichments of its
meaning by what it was able to deliver in each case. The saying
becomes fertile only if it can be read differently from the way Riemer
writes it, if it can be detached from the unequivocally monotheistic
mysticism of intradivine dualization with which he associates it and
set in the more comprehensive reference system that includes panthe-
ism and polytheism. For this, Goethe's continual use of the saying in
regard to Napoleon, whch he keeps up from 1807 to 1830, gives the
most solid support, despite his retraction of the "divine" into the
[merely] "demonic."
If we view it in this way, there is no "correct understanding of the
saying," but only the question which of its ambiguous meanings could
satisfactorily epitomize Goethe's self-experience in each case. Knowl-
532
Part IV
edge of the [saying's] source, assuming the clearest evidence of its

derivation from it, would nevertheless still not be an "important pre-
requisite for the correct understanding of the saying. "14 Consequently
it is only an observation made in passing when I say that it seems to
me to be out of the question that such a source should not already
have been found, if it existed. 15 Goethe's reading was not in such out-
of-the-way texts that something contained in them could have escaped
the ubiquity of philology. No piece of humanistic evidence has ever
been searched for so intensively. But Goethe was familiar with the
pattern of the genus, paradox, and formal imitation was not something
he found difficult. The all-important fact is that for Goethe himself,
the use of the term god with an indefinite article was the natural one.
It is not the expectation that a source could finally be reliably assigned
and exhibited that can lead us astray, but rather the insistence that
the result of any investigation of the use of the saying must be an
unambiguous interpretation of it. On the contrary, it is in agreement
with both Goethe's admissions and his intentions that he left the
addressees of his dicta-in the widest sense, his audience-standing
unenlightened before their ambiguity precisely in cases where he meant
to communicate something that was important to him. The pedant
Riemer is a clear instance of such withholding on Goethe's part.
This insurmountable reservation can give rise to disappointment
only when a singular situation defines people's interest in the "extra-
ordinary saying" as unequivocally as it had visibly come to be defined
immediately after World War II. Carl Schmitt rightly traced the schol-
arly exertions that were revived then back to the fact that the sentence
"was quoted and interpreted, by people who were familiar with Goethe,
in countless nonpublic conversations during the last war (from 1939
to 1945). "16 The admiration for the apothegm was almost inevitably
fixed on the implication, unmistakable in the circumstances at the
time, that what was meant was the blasphemy of the pretension to
measure oneself against God. The secret comfort from Dichtung und
Wahrheit, with which those who knew Goethe consoled themselves,
will have presented itself as an image in the fact that Goethe had
before his eyes, in that fourth part, the failed Napoleon, the incarnate
demon who had been able, if any man at all was able, to confront
God with defiance, and whom only the summoning up of the universe
was able to overcome. But let us not forget, for Goethe there is always
bound up with the category of the demonic, down to the end, the
533
Chapter 4
element of justification that was indispensable for him in order to

prevent his own finding of identity under Napoleon's gaze from having
been fruitless - even after the latter's end on the rock of Saint Helena.
Not everything that can be discovered can be discovered at any
time. Part of the character of the concern for knowledge that was
devoted to Goethe' s saying after Germany's downfall is that in the
midst of the saying's endless applications still another unsuspected
new one could be found in an entirely conventional philological manner,
namely, in the search for its source. That the saying could be capable
of still another Christianization is something that one would least of
all have been able to suppose. Nevertheless, when Carl Schmitt says
that Goethe's dictum- "which he no doubt himself formulated in
Latin" - "was derived from Christology," then this would seem to me
more plausible, in terms of the configuration with which Goethe was
familiar, then to search in the obscurity of mysticisms of divine self-
estrangement a la Jakob Bohme. For Goethe did, after all, see in
Prometheus the son of Zeus - as a result of ignorance of the original
myth-and always saw in the myth his own conflict with his father.
A connection between the saying and the Christian tradition would
not have had to impose any restriction on its applications when it was
in Goethe's possession. Predefined interpretations are no more im-
portant than the 'source.' The saying does not have a context; it
acquires one only by seizing it.
Thus the finding that Carl Schmitt has submitted only increases the
extent to which the horizon of possible significances is occupied. It is
a passage from a sketch of a drama, Catharina von Siena, by Jakob
Michael Lenz - one of the literary versions of Sturm und Drang rebellion
against the father that wanted to legitimate themselves by means of
higher consecrations and summonses, such as those of aesthetic genius
or (in a merely metaphorical case) of the spirit of holiness. In Lenz's
fragment, the theme is Catharina's flight from her father's tyrannical
love to devotion to God. For Catharina the renunciation of her earthly
artist-beloved, whom her father rejects in favor of his choice, and the
turning to her heavenly beloved, whom he cannot reject, sets the stage
for holiness as a flight, on which her loving and lovingly violent father
pursues her. In shuddering awareness of the danger of being overtaken
by his loving tyranny, she sees herself not, it is true, directly involved
in the conflict of gods, but represented in it:
Mein Vater blickte wie ein liebender
Part IV
Gekrankter Gott mich drohend an.

Doch hatt' er beide Hande ausgestreckt-
Gott gegen Gott!
[My father looked at me threateningly, like a loving, aggrieved god.
But if he had reached out both his hands - God against god!]
With these words, according to the poet's stage directions, she draws
a small crucifix from her bosom and kisses it, promising herself to
the other God:
Errette, rette mich
Mein Jesus, dem ich folg', aus seinem Arm! 17
[Save me, rescue me, my Jesus, whom I follow, from his arms!]
So the god who stands against the father-god here is the Son of God.
When Catharina protects herself against the merely imagined temp-
tation of the outstretched hands of her father by the 'apotropaic' [ill-
averting] grasping of the crucifix, then this, in an exaggerated theo-
logical metaphor, is itself the conflict of gods as a monologic expression
of the impossibility of the embrace: It would be the unthinkable disaster
of a confrontation of god against god.
He who wishes to can find in this monologue of Catharina evidence
that in the Sturm und Drang cult of "genius" he has before him the
secularized form of the absolute claim of grace, of inspiration, contempt
for the world, holiness. Lenz himself suggests this interpretation. The
scene comes from the first of four revisions of the play, to which Lenz
at first gave, in the last version, the title "A Religious Drama," only
to strike out the adjective "religious" and put "A Drama of Art. "18
Since the third version was written in Weimar, where Lenz stayed
from April to November of 1776, and since there is evidence of his
intending to dedicate the play to Goethe, one cannot exclude the
possibility that Goethe was acquainted with the monologue containing
the exclamation "God against god!" But then, Goethe had long since
put his "One against one!"b at the beginning of his involvement with
Prometheus.
Let us leave aside the fact that in this line of the monologue, Lenz
is probably only bringing forward Aeschylus's "deus contra deum"
from the Choephoroi, where it had characterized the conflict between
C
the gods of public law and the gods of family ties-a constellation,
then, having less to do with the separation of powers than with the
535
Chapter 4
historical replacement of one generation of gods by another. 19 Even

if there is a probability that Goethe knew Lenz's fragment and that
its pagan background remained hidden from him, still I would consider
it at least as probable that this sort of embedding in Christology would
have spoiled the formula for him and made it unserviceable for his
own use. Think of the sixty-sixth Venetian Epigram, where the god
with the indefinite article gives what the poet can endure, but the
God who is represented by a cross, and who is given his proper name
only in the autograph manuscript, is as repugnant to him as poison
or a snake - and this in the low society of tobacco smoke, bugs, and
garlic. A nameless god, to whom he submits, opposed to the named
God, who is repugnant to him.
That leads back to the point where Carl Schmitt, with his discovery
in Lenz, will be found to be right in the end: Both here and there the
talk is not of the one God and his possible self-estrangement, but
rather of two gods, of the dualism - prevented only with difficulty in
the history of Christian dogma-of the Creator and the Redeemer,
the demiurge and the man-god, the constraining Father and the lib-
erating Son.
If we must proceed from the assumption that the "extraordinary
saying" was not to be found anywhere, and consequently could not
be "cited" from or picked up by reading anything, then its definitive
formulation, for Dichtung und Wahrheit, will hardly have been laid down
by Goethe without any exchange with Riemer, the Latinist. The latter
does pride himself, in the Mittheilungen, on having reminded Goethe
of it as a motto, but nowhere reveals any part he may have played
in its definitive production. When Goethe was dead, the administrators
of his literary remains were able to set the most daring dictum on
the title page of the fourth part of his autobiography. But it is a
different question whether any of them would have wanted to see
this ambiguous saying, which bordered on the blasphemous, attributed
to himself, especially when from the text-which screens everything
with the name of "Egmont"-the relationship to Napoleon nevertheless
had to emerge unmistakably for the reader, if only from the order
of magnitude [that was impliedJ.
When Riemer agreed to the administrators' proposal for the motto
for the fourth part, he may not have remembered his diary entry of
1810 about the close connection between Goethe's utterance of the
"magnificent dictum" and his remark about Napoleon and the world
536
Part IV
balance. The decision, as we know from. evidence that was unknown

for a long time, was made at the beginning of 1833. It was not Riemer
who thought of the "extraordinary saying" this time. He had made
up his mind, on the contrary, in favor of a motto relating to Lili,d as
he writes to Chancellor von Muller on January 18, 1833: "In regard
to the motto, I am also more in favor of the Lili material, and I have
accordingly written down several such as suggestions .... "20 That was
Riemer's answer in response to the alternative, posed by Eckermann,
of bringing out, in the motto, either the thematic reference to Goethe's
relationship with Lili or the reference to the demonic. On the very
next day Eckermann communicates to Muller a different and final
decision, which goes in favor of the demonic: "I have given the volume
a motto that expresses the power of the demonic and that Riemer
entirely approves of and considers superior to those that he sent to
you. "
If one keeps in view this incident, which first became clear in 1964
and was therefore still withheld from the postwar discussion about
the saying, then another piece of evidence, which was extracted from
the Weimar archive as early as 1954 and which derives from the same
year, 1833, becomes more eloquent. It is a note, dated the afternoon
of May 7, 1833, that Riemer made while reading Heine's book, which
had just appeared in Paris and Leipzig, Zur Geschichte der neuren scho'nen
Literatur in Deutschland [On the history of recent belles-lettres in Ger-
many; later retitled Die romantische Schule, The Romantic school]:
" 'Nemo contra Deum nisi Deus ipse' is a principle that I have always
privately applied to Napoleon, although it does not fit him alone, but
every circumstance that has to be put an end to by a reaction-and
see, here, Heine, on p. 59 of his newest pamphlet, applies this idea
in just the same way, without mentioning the saying by name. 'And
in fact, no one at all could avail against Napoleon but God himself.' "21
This note is already precious because in it Riemer confirms, one
single time, the wording of the saying (apart from the spelling of the
name of "God") that appeared in Dichtung und Wahrheit and was taken
over for the motto. Elsewhere, in all his notes and communications-
even including those n1ade a decade after this note - Riemer writes
"Nihil contra ... " ["Nothing (can prevail) against ... " as opposed to
"Nemo": "No one"]. One could call that the impersonal wording of
the saying, which seems to fit the pantheistic conception better than
the polytheistic one. The differentiation may be of secondary impor-
537
Chapter 4
tance in view of Riemer's vague understanding of the saying, but in

relation to the question of whether the saying is a quotation or an
invention, the deviation is crucial. Riemer would hardly have followed
Goethe's way of writing the saying if he had known the "Nihil con-
tra ... ," which he prefers elsewhere, to be in agreement with any
documented use. The philologist and pedant would not have diverged
from a prior source like Zinkgraf Something that was freely invented
was less binding. That is why only the text that Goethe left behind
him could determine the wording of the motto, even though it was
contrary to Riemer's notes about what Goethe had said (and what he,
Riemer, had preferred).
But the second difference between Riemer's way of writing the
sentence and Goethe's (which was taken over into the motto) lies in
the fact that Riemer begins the name of God with a capital letter,
and Goethe begins it with a lowercase one. When Riemer rediscovered
the application of the saying to Napoleon, in Heine's statement, as
one that he had himself privately carried out all along, this showed
that he understood not only the saying but also its application to
Napoleon entirely differently from Goethe, because he had to read it
as saying that against a god (like Napoleon) only (the one) God himself
can avail. For it is in just that way that Heine would have had to
understand the saying if he had actually had it in mind in connection
with the statement Riemer quotes. Overlooking for a moment the fact
that in this way Riemer extracts from the saying an additional meaning,
and one that is entirely foreign to Goethe, he demonstrates his char-
acteristic tendency to hold firm in every case to the monotheistic
interpretation as it results from his capitalization of the name - in
which case it can only be for the sake of paradox that Napoleon, too,
is called a god.
Riemer knew that Goethe had taken a different path in this regard,
and had fixed it definitively with the category of the "demonic." When
I say that he knew it, then, at least for the period after Goethe's death,
I assume more than the sort of diffuse comprehension that finds
satisfaction in the profundity of the formula. How do I justify this?
From Riemer's literary remains, which are preserved in Weimar, a
slip of paper has come to light that was contained in an envelope
labeled "Eliminated from the material for the Reflections and Maxims"
and that exhibits something Goethe had come up with that Riemer
himself explicitly describes as a "good interpretation" of the "extra-
538
Part IV
ordinary saying. "22 On the slip, first the foHowing verse is noted down:
"Saepe premente Deo fert Deus alter opem" [Often, when one god
affiicts you, another god brings aid]. Riemer adds that the verse seems
to be from Ovid and that Goethe made a note of it in his "memo-
randum" book.23 Riemer's evaluation of the verse Goethe had found
is of independent interest on account of its again testifying to Riemer's
preferred way of writing the "extraordinary saying": "I make a note
of it as a good interpretation of 'Nihil contra Deum nisi Deus ipse.' "
It is the reading that corresponds to the 'separation of powers': If one
god oppresses you, another one helps - but it has to be a god.
On Riemer's slip of paper there is one more, final notation, which
puts it beyond doubt that he had become conscious of the different
character of polytheism, which was implied in his recognition of the
Ovid verse as a "good interpretation" of the saying. For he pronounces
nothing less than the generalization of Ovid's verse into a structural
principle of mythology: "In Greek and Roman mythology it is certainly
the case that often one god gives aid against the other one. No doubt
also in Indian mythology." Here, at the latest, Riemer had to have
realized that Goethe's note, once it was brought together with his way
of understanding the "extraordinary saying," did not agree with his
own interpretation and way of writing it. Because in the Ovid verse,
the term god unquestionably has to be read with the indefinite article.
It is the god of the Venetian Epigram: "Duld ich mit ruhigem Mut,
wie es ein Gott mir gebeut" [I put up with (objectionable things) calmly,
as a god commands me].e
Even if there is no evidence that Goethe picked out and copied the
Ovid verse with an eye to the interpretability - and to his interpre-
tation-of the "extraordinary saying," still the structural principle of
myth that is expressed in it, the principle of mutual adjustment and
of the separation of powers, precisely suits his remarks (in connection
with the saying) about the balance of powers within the world, up to
the limiting case of this equilibrium that is seen in the fact that the
demonic can only be overcome by the universe itself. Myth does not
yet have any idea of this limiting case, because it already presupposes
the combination of polytheism with pantheism. In that respect, Goethe's
final and only unquestionably genuine remark, in the fourth part of
Dichtung und Wahrheit, goes beyond everything that has previously
been written down by others. It is the final balance that only Napoleon's
539
Chapter 4
fate had made it possible for him to draw up-the demon's end,
brought about by the \vhole.
In concluding his excursus on his early religious and metaphysical
turnings, his approaches to the supersensible in the extreme forms of
Pietism and a religion of nature, Goethe says that he articulates in
this 'empirical demonology' something that reaches far ahead of the
phases of his life that he is discussing (up to his flight from Lili to the
court at Weimar)-something of which he "convinced himself only
much later." For at that time, as he was "concentrating himself in
himself," he arrived, instead, at the realization "that it was better to
ward off thoughts of what is monstrous and incomprehensible."f Only
in the image of Count Egmont was there already present what was
only to gain conceptual clarity so much later, as a result of his own
.
expenence.
I would now like to attempt to reduce the hermeneutics of the
"extraordinary saying" to an issue that would not go beyond what
can be dealt with in a methodical manner. I employ for this purpose
the most important apothegm that Goethe himself provided in regard
to the essential ambiguity of his concept of divinity. We are, he said,
"pantheists in the investigation of nature, polytheists in poetry, mono-
theists in ethics. "24 Can this central self-interpretation be used as a
means of elucidating the ambiguity of the paradox on the same subject?
This is already made to appear likely by the fact that the three
positions, in their peculiar nonexclusiveness with respect to one another,
are sufficiently clearly visible in the late demonology of Dichtung und
Wahrheit: the moral world-order, which is crisscrossed by the demonic
power, and the demonic element, which can only be overcome by
the universe itself
Here one is led far back to the peculiar misunderstanding that had
emerged in the "Prometheus" scene between Lessing and Jacobi,
when the polytheism of Goethe's early ode was supposed to have
caused Lessing to reveal his Spinozism. It seems that for Goethe himself
the "extraordinary saying" analyzed itself into three aspects corre-
sponding to the three' -theisms.' In this connection the linguistic form
is not contingent, not an external addition, but instead is closely bound
up with the immanent genesis of the saying.
In regard to its formal construction, the interpreters - insofar as
they regarded Goethe as its author, or at least allowed room for that
possibility-have assumed that the pedagogue Riemer \vill certainly
540
Part IV
have assisted Goethe in its Latin formul~tion. There is, after all, no
doubt about the fact that, precisely in May 1807, Goethe borrowed
a collection of Zinkgraf s apothegms from the Weimar library and
(according to the evidence of his diary) read in it frequently, primarily
after meals. We know on equally good authority that Riemer enjoyed
putting things into Latin and that he said of Goethe that he found
Latin formulas like "difficilia quae pulchra" [what is beautiful is difficult]
or "ars est de difficili et bono" [art derives from what is difficult and
good] especially expressive and rich in references. 25 It is easy to forget,
in this connection, that even if the source had been Zinkgraf, the
translation into Latin would still remain to be accomplished, since the
anthology contains, as its title says, Teutsche scharpfsinnige kluge Spriiche
Apophthegmata genannt [German sagacious and clever sayings, which
are called apothegms]. So the mere quotation of a German saying
would not have sufficed, nor would it have satisfied Goethe's desire
for form, since he advises modem authors to write in Latin precisely
"when they have to make something out of nothing. "26
But Riemer was twenty-five years younger than Goethe, and became
his secretary and his son's tutor only in 1803. What came before that?
On October 10, 1786, in Venice, Goethe notes in his diary that for
years he has been unable to look at any Latin writer on account of
memories of Italy, of the image that he yearned for. "Herder always
made fun of me for having learned all my Latin from Spinoza, because
he noticed that it was the only ~,atin book that I read." This document
is made invaluable by another from the same year. Earlier that year,
on February 20, Goethe had written to Herder, regarding the dispute
about Lessing's final convictions, that he had not been able to finish
reading Mendelssohn's polemic An die Freunde Lessings [To Lessing's
friends], and had passed it on to Frau von Stein, who would perhaps
have better luck with it. Instead - but not without regard to the central
name in that dispute - he had immediately, "for an evening bene-
diction," opened his Spinoza and read some pages in it, beginning
with the proposition: "qui Deum amat, conari non potest, ut Deus
ipsum contra amet" [He who loves God cannot desire that God should
love him in return].27 The subject was the nineteenth proposition in
part 5 of the Ethics, which Spinoza proves by establishing, in man's
desire that God should return his love, the contradiction that such a
man would desire, at the same time as he loved God, that God should
not be God. That is traditional metaphysics: God can be loved and
541
Chapter 4
thus move everything, but he can have only himself as the perfect
object of his thought and his love, and nothing and no one else besides.
One who nevertheless wants to move God on his own behalf contradicts
his essence, does not want him to be what he is.
From our distance, the proof may seem like hairsplitting. But it
consists only in the establishment of the contradiction, not in the
conclusion that because of the contradiction that would be involved
in his love being returned, man cannot be capable of wanting God
to exist. On the contrary, man is considered to be capable of the
selfless love of God that is thus enjoined upon him. That is the exact
antithesis of the central proposition of the late medieval and Refor-
mation theologies, that man by nature cannot by any means want
God to be God. Rather, he must necessarily, as a result of his nature
alone, want to be God himself. 28 Pantheism's amor dei [love of God] is
directed against the type of antinaturalistic theology that is expressed
in this maximal formula. We should compare to this the 'contrary-
to-fact' reading of the "extraordinary saying": Man cannot take a
stand against God; only one who was also a god could do this. The
demonization of the ungraced [i.e., the "natural"] will, which is involved
in Luther's thesis, g is excluded from the realm of what is possible for
man.
Following the example of the way the Bible was used in his parents'
house, Goethe was a chance opener of books. He opened them at
random and found what he was looking for. It confirmed, for him,
that life flowed to him, in exemplary self-presentation, and displayed
itself to his perception of its own accord. Regarding that "evening
benediction," too, after his satiety with the Spinoza dispute, we can
assume that he reached for the Ethics and let it open at a chance page.
In this way he came upon the proposition about the absolute selflessness
of the unreciprocated love of God. This proposition contains almost
the entire verbal material of what will appear in his own saying about
God. That may seem like too little on which to found the assumption
that the one was constructed from the other. But the logic of the proof
leads further, to the transformation of the proposition.
To expect reciprocal love from God would mean to require him,
himself, to give up his essence-in other words, it would mean to
offer him the epitome of hatred. But the metaphysical tradition asserts
without exception that what is perfect can only be loved and desired,
and its existence can only be met with assent. Consequently, fol1o\ving
542
Part IV
Spinoza's previous thesis, it is impossible to desire God's nonexistence

so that one could be God oneself: "Nemo potest Deum odio habere"
[No one can hate God]. Not to love God is just as much contrary to
man's essence as it would be contrary to God's essence for him to
love man in return for that. The proof follows from a premise that
neither the late Middle Ages nor the Reformer would have shared:
from the condition that man possesses an adequate concept of God's
essence. The import of these propositions of Spinoza's is that no one
can oppose God who has understood what he is; and ,the conclusion
is that the only one who could oppose God would be' one who was
I
himself a god-which cannot possibly be, since the one God is already
everything. From the point of view of Spinozism, the "extraordinary
saying" says, in Spinoza's language, that nothing ahd no one can
oppose God, because this would imply the existence of a second God,
which is a contradiction.
Spinoza's God is a God without an antithesis, without opposition,
a God of acquiescence in what in fact exists, as what is necessary: For
the rebel, he is a God of resignation, and for the lover, a God of
unthreatened unity. There is no possible counterpart to the divinity-
the divinity would itself have to become repugnant to itself, to undergo
division in the depths of its own foundation, in the manner described
by Bohme, which, in Spinoza's logic, is sheer absurdity. For Goethe,
that is a position opposed to Christianity, to propositions like Luther's
anti-Scholastic disputation thesis. h All of that is excluded by the more
general early proposition of the Ethics: "Praeter Deum nulla dari, neque
concipi potest substantia" [Besides God, no substance can be nor can
be conceived]. 29
In the fourteenth book of Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe will assign
to a much earlier date his predilection for the proposition of Spinoza's
that he picks out, in writing to Herder, as something hit on by accident.
There Spinoza provides-in the face of Fraulein von Klettenberg's Pi-
etism, Basedow's frivolities, and Lavater's zealous dilemma, "Either a
Christian or an atheist!"-the gentle antidote of a God whom no one
can oppose and in loving whom no one falls into the selfishness of
expecting a response or a reward. To the young man, this God could
appear as the hypostasis of pure friendship, of what Goethe will de-
scribe, so much later, as his "highest desire": "To be unselfish in
everything, and most unselfish of all in love and friendship." Here,
then, we will have to gather how, in the web of his relations to Lavater,
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Chapter 4
Basedow, and Jacobi, the thesis that he later quoted to Herder becomes
the nucleus around which a fundamental metaphysical disposition
crystallizes, in which everything is to be given and no advantage
expected.
The mediator between Goethe and Spinoza had been Merck, and
Goethe had followed Mephistopheles's temptation with suitable cau-
tion. i On April 7, 1773, he writes to the Giessen legal scholar Hopfner:
"Merck has given me your Spinoza. Would you mind if I kept it for
a little while? I just want to see how far I can follow the man in his
tunnels and lodes." A decade later he reads the Ethics with Charlotte
von Stein. "This evening I will be with you and we will read further
in the mysteries that are so congenial to your disposition. "30 Two days
later he reports to Knebel about this shared reading: "I am reading
Spinoza's Ethics with Frau von Stein. I feel myself to be very close to
him, although his spirit is much deeper and purer than mine. "31 In
this situation, the impact on him of 'Jacobi's metaphysical nonsense
regarding Spinoza, in the course of which he also, unfortunately, com-
promises me," was only incidental. 32 When Goethe writes to Charlotte
on November 19, 1784: "I will bring Spinoza in Latin, where everything
is much clearer and more beautiful," this was once again only a
borrowed copy. Only for her birthday, on December 25, does Herder
make Frau von Stein a gift of the copy of the Ethics that he had himself
received from Gleim as a present in 1776. The high point of intensity
was that' anticipatory provocation addressed to the unmasker of Spi-
nozism: "I train myself on Spinoza, I read him and read him again,
and I look forward to the day when the battle will break out over his
dead body."33
In his autobiographical recollection of this period, Goethe no longer
knows what he may have read out of or read into the Ethics; but he
remembers the challenge to selflessness, the calming of his passions,
that emanated from this work. "But what especially riveted me to
him was the utter unselfishness that shone forth in his every sentence.
That singular statement, 'He who truly loves God must not require
God to love him in return,' together with all the preliminary propositions
on which it rests, and all the consequences that flow from it, filled all
rny reflections." If we take this assertion seriously, and also the in-
fonnation, which i~ not unirnportant in our context here, that Goethe
preferred the Latin edition of the Ethics, then it is not too great a leap
to the idea that he may have devised paradoxical variations on that
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Part IV
theorem, and may at least have drawn Dear to what, at the end of
Dichtung und Wahrheit, he will no longer describe merely as a "singular
statement," but rather, with increased intensity, as an "extraordinary
saying." A formula that has such deep roots in the course of a life
takes on an outline long before its literal formulation springs forth.
One should not picture such further work on Spinoza's proposition
as free variation. There were already limiting preconditions for it.
Thus it is remarkable that Goethe's admiration for the "singular state-
ment" relates exclusively to the human amor dei [love of God] as a
prototype for selfless love and friendship, but not to the divine partner
[in the relationship], who seems to be introduced only in order to cut
off every byway and outlet of self-reference, while in himself he is a
cold and unmoving figure. Goethe had no feeling for the God of
metaphysics, the unmoved mover, who, after all, still stands behind
Spinoza's concept of God. The center of the Ethics is, for him, only a
metaphor for human matters. Whereas the divine that becomes tangible
and experienceable is god in the plural. It is the concept of god that
is founded in the Promethean experience of conflict, a concept that
already violently contradicts Spinoza's by its use of the term hatred:
"I worship the gods, but I still feel enough courage to swear eternal
hatred for them if they mean to behave toward us the way their
.
Image, men, d o. "34
No statement is conceivable that would be more remote from Spi-
noza. So here is a person who knows and says of himself that he could
be against 'God,' and who has not yet excluded the possibility that
he might be capable of this as being a god himself. For his arch aid
premise is that not only can like be known only by like, but also only
one of a like kind can oppose himself to another of the like kind.
Goethe is, after all, not only the author of an out-of-the-way theory
of color directed against Newton, against the microscope and the
telescope, he is also (without having achieved historical clarity about
this himself) opposed to the entire epistemological process that stands
behind modem science and in which relations of equivalence between
subject and object-evert the palest form of the Aristotelian "Anima
quodammodo omnia" [Soul that is in a certain way everythingl-had
been abandoned. Goethe's theory of knowledge, which he never de-
veloped and which probably hardly could be worked out, would only
have been a special case of the universal world-principle of equivalence
according to which, in general, only like things can enter into relations
545
Chapter 4
of any kind, including those of confrontation and enmity. Where the

world is not connected by means of equivalences, it is pure indifference.
Goethe proceeded from a mythical world-principle whose positive
formula would be that only like relates to like, while its negative
expression would be that only like can rebel against like. For the
divine, the ancient world had expanded this into the thesis that the
soul can know the divine things in the heavens and above the heavens
only because it is itself a divine thing that originated in the heavens.
Goethe knew the verses of the Stoic, Manilius, and wrote them on
September 4, 1784, in the book on [the summit of] the Brocken:
QJ1is coelum possit nisi coeli nomine nosse
Et reperire deum, nisi qui pars ipse deorum est?
[Who is able to know the heavens except by their name, and to find
out God unless he himself is a part of the gods?]
This Stoic equivalence motive is stronger than the genuine Platonism
in the famous poem written in the autumn of 1805 after reading
Plotinus: "War nich das Auge sonnenhaft ... "[If the eye were not
sunlike ... ]. k But that is the most vivid formula the equivalence principle
has found.
Just as one can only recognize a god if one has something divine
to employ in doing so, one can only resist a god if one is a god oneself.
But one can be a god only if gods are possible, many gods. It is just
this that Luther had excluded from consideration and translated into
monotheistic terms: He who wanted to be God - and it was naturally
self-evident for him that man had to want this - could only want to
be it in place cif the one God. Where no equivalence is possible, thinking
has to take the form of the desire to annihilate; the potential murder
of God can only be gotten rid of by the annihiliation of the nature
that has to desire it-by the replacement of that nature, through an
act of grace. Only in a polytheistic context does the 'contrary-to-fact'
construction of the "extraordinary saying" become one that expresses
a possibility. In relation to Spinoza, that is the mythical tendency in
Goethe's recasting [of Spinoza's theoreml-his pre-Christian, fasci-
nating, but of course historically quite unattainable anachronisln.
The equivalence principle deprives the insubordination of its moral
s~riousness: Spinoza's God cannot return our arnOT dei, but he Inakes
up for that by not playing with us either. Jean Paul discovered the
briefest characterization of what sets the Inythical apart: "Gods can
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Part IV
play, but God is serious. "35 So Goethe, affe.cted in an entirely different,

immediate way, had said in a letter to Kestner as early as 1773, as
the heartfelt sigh of one who has been robbed: "May God forgive the
gods for playing with us in this way. "36 But he had also drawn a
different comparison, not much later, in opposing Lavater's zeal: "Your
thirst for Christ moved me to pity. You are in worse shape than us
pagans; after all, our gods appear to us when we are in distress."3 7
The Incarnation of the God who withholds himself carries no weight
against the ubiquity of the pagan gods, against the small comfort of
their ability to appear, the comfort that metamorphosis, despite its
unseriousness in comparison to the great seriousness of the Incarnation,
still furnishes. Finally, one has to add the grim irony with which Goethe
defended himself against the charge of paganism by pointing out that
he precisely did not permit the author who ruled and passed judgment
over the fates of his characters to be interpreted as a pagan divinity;
according to Varnhagen's report, Goethe, speaking to General von
RUhle, answered such a reproach by saying: "I, a pagan? Come now,
I had Gretchen hung and let Ottily starve, isn't that Christian enough
for them? What more Christian behavior could they ask for?"38 The
author, in relation to his creations, in the bitter earnest with which
he obeys what is necessary for them, leaving them no 'play,' is, for
their world, the one God who tolerates no foreign gods alongside
himself
I would like to consider what we have arrived at here once more,
from the point of view that is defined by Riemer's notes of his con-
versation with Goethe on February 1, 1808. The occasion was Goethe's
having heard that someone had called him a "godlike [go·ttlichen] man."1
In the language of Sturm und Drang, this had been a common phrase.
Even Schiller had used this language in describing how he was repelled,
in the beginning, by Goethe's person and conduct: "To be often in
Goethe's company would make me unhappy .... He proclaims his
existence beneficently, but only like a god: without giving himself-
this seen1S to me to be a consistent and methodical mode of behavior,
which is aimed at the maximum enjoyment of self-love. People should
not allow such a manner to develop around them. He is hateful to
me on account of it, although I love his spirit with all my heart and
think hin1 noble. He seems to me like a proud prude, whom one must
make pregnant in order to humble her before the world. "39 Now,
twenty years later, when Goethe's "godlikeness" is addressed, his
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Chapter 4
contradiction is harsh and consciously paradoxical: "To the devil with

godlikeness!" He may not even have imagined that Schiller had once
compared him to Spinoza's God, from whose mute incapacity for love
he had himself wanted, after all, to extract a totally different meta-
phor - namely, a metaphor for selfless friendship.
Now he sees that the attribute of divinity can end by furnishing
itself with a focus for resistance, for others to use in establishing
themselves by not respecting it. They only acknowledge as godlike,
he says, one who lets them have their way in whatever they feel like
doing. A god who cannot do that is a stimulus to rebellion, one who
provokes the contra [opposition]. According to Riemer, Goethe expressed
this on another occasion as follows: "People do not regard anyone as
a god except when they want to act in a ,,,,ay that is contrary to his
laws, because they hope to deceive him; or because he puts up with
things; or because he relaxes his absoluteness enough to let them be
absolute too." That is a retrospect, already almost contemptuous, on
the former Prometheus, who had, as it were, fallen into the trap of
becoming a god. The point of the myth is the inevitability, for the
god, of engendering other gods, defiant demiurges, by the fascination
of the absolute. The weakness of Zeus, who had not been able to
prevent the theft of fire and the practice of deception in sacrifice and
who has to be (halfheartedly) satisfied with a punishment that, while
it does make the criminal suffer, does not remove his power to the
extent of abolishing the consequences of his deed - this weakness was
a more important condition of the possibility of Prometheus than his
consciousness was. The formulas that Goethe uses can only be under-
stood polytheistically, because neither in Spinozism nor in monotheism
can there be such a thing as a relaxation from absoluteness. Goethe
concludes his warding off of the attribute of divinity by exchanging
the roles, so that he is no longer Prometheus, but Zeus: "1 am like
God in that he continually allows things to happen that he does not
want to happen. "40
The god who cannot tolerate any foreign gods beside himself pro-
cures them for himself only by virtue of the fact that he wants to be
a god. It is only against a god that there are gods at all; this is what
pantheism wanted to rid the world of. When the conversation in \vhich
Goethe wards off "divinity" took place, early in 1808, he had in fact
had an experience with such a god, who had defined himself in op-
position to him. The year before that- the year in which the "extra-
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Part IV
ordinary saying" had found its formula for the first time-Kleist's
Amphitryon had appeared in Dresden: the drama of a rivalry between
a god and a man over the man's wife. Kleist does not make Jupiter
hide from the homecoming commander with the help of metamor-
phosis. Even if he may not have been certain of success with Alcmene
without that aid, nevertheless afterward he is all the more confidently
and cynically conscious of his ascendancy over the victor in battle.
The comedy ends in a conciliatory mood, with generosity on both
sides: After all, Zeus has already begotten the son whom the com-
mander desires from the god - Hercules, the performer of "immense
works" and candidate for apotheosis.
Did Kleist, as Katharina Mommsen concluded,41 represent or si-
multaneously have in view, in the comedy, his bitterly competitive
relationship to Goethe, and his conception of himself in relation to
Goethe - in other words, did he present Goethe in the form of Jupiter
and himself in that of Amphitryon? Her decoding is based, above all,
on the irony of the pantheistic sayings that are put in the mouth of
Jupiter, where his manner of speaking formally imitates that of Faust
in his confession of faith to Gretchen. It must have had "an unpleasant
effect on Goethe when he encountered the mockingly frivolous
pantheism verses in Amphitryon." And he encountered them imme-
diately after their appearance, as his diary shows with a note made
in Karlsbad on July 13, 1807: "I read and was astonished, as at the
most singular sign of the times .... " Remarks made to Riemer and
Reinhard on subsequent days confirm the way the play occupies and
irritates him, if only because he scents Romanticism in the alienated
Christology of the "annunciation":
Dir wird ein Sohn geboren werden,
Dess Name Herkules ...
[A son will be born unto you, whose name will be Hercules ... ]
The way the spirit of the age suggested that one read the work is
spelled out by Adam Muller to Gentz on May 25, 1807: It deals, he
writes, '\vith the immaculate conception by the holy Virgin." What
Muller gives out as the evidence of a "new age of art" seems to Goethe,
in the retrospect of his Tag- undjahreshefte [Daily and annual notebooks]
(written in 1823 for 1808), as "an important but unwelcome meteor
in a new literary sky." If Adam Muller had written the preface to
Amphitryon, Goethe knew what that meant; because only in 1806,
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Chapter 4
Muller had expressed, in his Lectures on German Science and Literature,

the expectation that Goethe would be surpassed by a greater writer
who would be able to unite antiquity and Christianity. That was the
program of contradiction in relation to which Amphitryon was meant
to be read. In the letter of rebuff that he wrote to Muller on August
28, 1807, Goethe opposes the principle of "organization" to the principle
of "contortion," by which he designates what Muller was calling for.I.
Katharina Mommsen conjectures that Goethe's experience with the

"Helen" act of Faust, which had run aground in 1800 a'nd which he
had followed in his Winckelmann of 1805 with the pro~:am of a pure
classicism, made him prone to irritation by this sort of synthesis.
I
Should another writer, after all, have already been able to achieve
what he was only to accomplish in 1827, with the "classical-romantic
phantasmagoria" of Helen?
The increase in significance that accrued to the "extr~ordinary say-
ing" in the year of its incarnation becomes manifest :in connection
with the conversation in which Goethe wards off "divinity." It becomes
possible to read it as describing the rivalry of Romanti~ism with yes-
terday's god. Illustrated with the Amphitryon, that means: Does not
the "extraordinary saying" present a formula, at the same time, both
for the resignation of the soldier returning home to Thebes who is
faced with the god sharing the couch of his Alcmene, and for the
cynicism of the self-confirmation of the god before whom one who
looks forward to such a son and such worldwide fame must humble
himself? Amphitryon resigns himself, because only a god could refuse
to pardon what this god had done, since also only a god-in Alcmene's
place-could have resisted him. But Kleist also makes this Jupiter who
stands for Goethe declare what will be his [Kleist's] own fate: that a
rival for the Olyrnpian laurels, in the Germany of the muses after
Schiller's death, himself had to be a god. No 'contrary-to-fact' sub-
junctive here, for Kleist did not, in fact, exclude this possibility. After
his c1eath, people were not allowed to pronounce "the name of this
Zeus" in the presence of his sister, UII-ike.
Goethe had gained this type of experience, not in relation to another
but in relation to himself. The Prometheus program had been that
one had to be a god-and, as a genius, one also could be a god-in
order to accomplish one's own will-to-a-world, as though no \vorlc1
yet existed that imposed the conditions of its 'reality' [(Realitat,' literally,
"thinghood"1 on the artist. Goethe's reversal of the Prometheus con-
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Part IV
ception as he grew older, and in his old .age, implied that one could
not be a god if one did not want to provoke everything to oppose
one's will-to provoke the universe finally to pull itself together in
order to destroy the demon who stretches himself out to be a god,
as Napoleon's end had demonstrated (which did not leave Goethe's
self-comparison to him unaffected, either). The advantage of Spinoza's
God was that he could be loved selflessly and that he made hate
impossible. But he was also, precisely on account of his proximity
extending to identity, a case of sheer indifference, by which nothing
and no one needed to feel affected. The result was that there was no
room for any story, any image, or any movement. For the artist, this
advantage of Spinozism was an undiluted loss. Polytheism, which makes
everything possible, aesthetically-the pure principle of metamor-
phosis-replaces Spinozistic indifference with the separation of powers,
with the continual summoning up of god against god. If the "extra-
ordinary saying" can no longer be read Spinozistically, as a 'contrary-
to-fact' construction, it is now the fundamental formula of myth in
all its figurations.
It is not God's dissension with himself that is conceived as the
limiting case of the absolute (and thus at the same time as the negation
of every other possibility of opposing a god who alone is able to oppose
himself), but rather the original schema of man's liberation from anxiety
in the face of all the powers that he cannot comprehend, insofar as
these seem to stand only against man, and must consequently be
thought of as being turned aside by opposition to one another. Gods,
when there are many of them, have their respective competencies,
among themselves - the system of their strengths and weaknesses.
Since they are originally forces and powers, they are, like forces and
powers, in their nature unrestricted, unless other forces and powers
restrict them. Because - and that is a reason for the dominant god's
jealousy- a god is never curbed except by another god.
The Humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam, cunningly deprived the say-
ing's antique forerunner of its point and precision when he translated
it, ambiguously: "Deo nemo potest nocere." [No one can harm (a
god) (God)]. 4~ He is rendering Creon's pronouncement, from Sophocles's
Antigone, that the denial of burial cannot dishonor the gods, since no
man whatever possesses the power that would be necessary to dishonor
gods. Erasmus considers it a pious statement, although the king of
Thebes spoke it out of an impious disposition: "Sententia pia est, sed
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Chapter 4
a Creonte impio animo dicta." Erasmus eliminated the divinity's plu-

rality and exploited the ambiguity that is inherent in the lack of an
article in Latin. But above all, by using the verb harm he avoided
letting the statement deny that dishonor could be done to God, since
the entire doctrine of sin and of the necessary redemption, in Christian
dogma, depends on that.
Thus, finally, the pious Christian meaning of the ancient dictum,
for Erasmus, turns out to lie in the fact that it attests to the intactness
of the divine being throughout the process by which, from the womb
of the Virgin, it became man. As the proposition stands there, in the
end, it has been reduced to the triviality (for monotheism) of an assertion
about the powerlessness of every other being over against the One.
God is God at all only by virtue of the fact that no one can be against
him. That is also Spinoza's fundamental idea; but in his case it is
founded on the uniqueness of the substance of everything in existence,
outside which nothing whatever exists that could stand against it. The
secret potential of Spinozism, which is still dimly visible in Goethe, in
the fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit, is that it permits talk of gods
insofar as they are "appearances," as everything else is in relation to
the identity of the ultimate substance. Polytheism would then be a
perspectival, anthropocentric way of expressing pantheism, and would
still be possible as the 'rhetoric' of the latter.
But that is not enough. Prometheus and Jupiter-they suffer from
the fact that they cannot conquer one another, but also cannot do
without one another, because each is the condition of the possibility
of the other. As applied to Goethe's youthful experience, this means
that aesthetic genius is not absolute, having to resort to defiance only
in opposition to those who impede and restrict it; on the contrary, it
has an entirely intrinsic need for rebellion, because its originality can
only be a counterposition. In a modernized linguistic mode, one would
say: The aesthetic is essentially historical; its character as an origin
proves, to the observer who is at rest, to be "reoccupation." At the
saIne time this implies that, in the strict sense, "creativity" does not
exist. Historicism, in a crime for which it has never been forgiven,
destroyed the consciousness of itself that was characteristic of Idealisnl,
as the delayed systematization of Sturm und Drang.
The fact that Goethe's "extraordinary saying," however one reads
it, is a pagan apothegm is made evident by comparing it either to
Luther's seventeenth thesis against Scholastic theology or to Eraslnus's
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Part IV
Christianization of Sophocles. One would. not need to emphasize this

if it were not for the fact that Carl Schmitt has introduced and argued
for a christological reading. This reading evokes the Trinitarian frame
of reference. One must make clear to oneself what that would mean,
if it could be successfully maintained. It cannot, of course, mean an
apotropaic [ill-averting] invocation, as in Catharina of Siena's monologue
in Lenz' s fragment. On Christological premises, a "God against God"
can only signify the delegation of the cause of mankind, vis-i-vis the
Father, to the Son, as the Atoner. That excludes metaphysical dualism,
whether of a Gnostic or a Neo-Platonic derivation.
In its historical function, the Christian dogma of the Trinity was,
after all, intended as a means of barring the way to dualism, by
reducing the impact of the bifurcation of the divinity that the production
of the Son brings with it, by means of a third agency that the two
cooperate in generating, and binding that bifurcation to the origin,
without retracting it or destroying its meaning in terms of salvation.
In this way the dogma succeeds in doing what Neo-Platonism had
failed in, when it was able to produce everything-in the end, the
manifold appearances of the visible world - from the original ground
of the One in no other way except by rebellion and apostasy, by loss
of being and forgetfulness of the origin, so that the only possible
recommendation was to trace the result back to its origin and surrender
it, again, in the latter. This metaphysical history of the world as a
single turning away of entities from their origin is the root of everything
in our tradition that makes the inner decomposition of the divinity a
precondition of man's world, which is seen as essentially tempting.
By contrast, the attempt of emanatism to interpret the origin [of the
world] as the overflowing of the original spring remained irresolute.
For this conception came into conflict with the attempt, which began
at the same time, to characterize the One as the unbounded; metaphor
and concept conflicted here in a way that could not be harmonized.
Hence the inner bifurcation, which avoids making what is perfect
capable of being seduced, in any way, by something outside it, and
makes itself into its sole possible source of opposition. For this position
Carl Schmitt appeals to the thesis of Gregory of Nazianzus that the
One (to Hen) is always in revolt (stasiaston) against itself (pros heauton).43
The early Christian development of dogma drew its life from the
fact that it liberated itself from Neo-Platonism's schema of decline,
and arrived at irreversible hypostases, which did not need to be 're-
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Chapter 4
duced' [brought back to the origin]. Nothing is taken back from them
even in the destruction of the world. The a voidance of every form of
docetism requires, in addition, that the Son remain man for all etern-
ity-something that is inexcusable in a god, and consequently is always
burdened with the residual difficulties that are still evident in the
speculative attempt to work out conceptually, in Scholasticism, an
eternal predestination to become man. There it becomes evident that
despite all the conjuring up of love and unity in the Trinity, traces of
the old dualistic temptations have remained ineffaceable. Especially
in the distribution of roles: of creation to the Father and redemption
to the Son, as well as of the posteschatological (even antieschatologicaD
institutionalization of the store of grace, which is assigned to the Spirit-
the Spirit of Disappointment. Thus when, rather than looking at the
conciliatory formulas, one analyzes what is implicit, an element of op-
position always remains-always something of Prometheus in the way
the Son acts in solidarity with mankind, who have fallen from Paradise.
That applies to the demand that we should see the harshest sacrifice
as the offer, to the Father, of the ransom for man; but it also applies
to the intradivine rivalry for the assumption of the office of judge at
the end of the ages. A Gnostic interpretation of the New Testament,
like Marcion's, could not have arisen if the bringer of salvation had
not already been, by his function alone, a reproach and a contradiction
vis-a.-vis the Creator of the world and his love for man. One will have
to bear that in mind in considering the possibility of a Christological
reading of the "extraordinary saying." The proposal touches on the
elementary tensions in the structure of our tradition.
It is easy to smile at the zeal of the "political theologian." But there
are unmistakable connections between the possible source that he has
introduced into the discussion and Goethe's mythical thematics. The
fragment of Lenz's Catharina was produced in the period of the Pro-
metheus fragment and at no great distance from the fundamental at-
titudes of the young Goethe that underlay it. It is possible that Goethe
borrowed from the characteristics of the figure, in the drama, of the
painter Correggio-the rival (prohibited by Catharina's father) of her
heavenly beloved. Still more important is the fact that Goethe, too,
understands this conflict between gods as a father-son conflict. That
is not only an episode ending with his departure for Weimar. It meshes
"vith his life program, which is formed in opposition to the sober
skepticism of his father, \\Tho does not accept his genius as a reliable
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Part IV
constant. When Goethe himself has become the rigid bookkeeper who
administers his sphere with painstaking exactitude, he may have crit-
icized his breaking away from his father with the formula that he
would only have been able to assert himself against the god if he had
really been the artist -god that he had made it his program to be. A
motto like the one assigned to the third part of Dichtung und Wahrheit
would have fit perfectly among the maxims of his father that he had
received with mockery at the time: "Care has been taken that trees
do not grow as high as heaven." The "extraordinary saying" is not
only metaphysics-and ifit is metaphysics, it is metaphysics constructed
on the ground plan of an experience of life.
Carl Schmitt wrote, regarding his discovery in the dramatic fragment
of Lenz, that he was certain "that the much-discussed riddle of Goethe's
saying has been deciphered here." Can we share his certainty of this?
If one relates the saying to the Prometheus myth, appropriated (in
Goethe's manner) as a father-son conflict, then a sort of 'mythogram, ,
reduced to abstraction, is the result. But this assumption in particular
does not permit a Christological hermeneutics. Even for the supposed
source, Catharina's outcry in Lenz's fragment, no Christological inter-
pretation presents itself. Catharina becomes a saint because the Son
becomes her God. Her flesh-and-blood father enters the picture only
under the metaphor of the "loving, aggrieved god." His tyranny cannot
return Catharina to him because she has on her side the God whose
name genius only metaphorically and episodically borrows. If her
father had embraced her, bringing her back to him and interrupting
the path of holiness, then the Son of God, to whom she engages herself
with her kiss and whose image she holds out against him, would have
been a deadly enemy in the bosom of the father-god. A scene in which
the Son is invoked as spiritual authority for the final break with the
sacredness of the father cannot be Christological. In
Carl Schmitt's reading of the "God against god" formula would

bring the" extraordinary saying" into the neighborhood of Schelling's
analysis of the Prometheus myth. Schelling drew the ultimate con-
sequence from the tendency that was implicit in the collateral tradition
according to which Prometheus was Zeus's son. For myth, what is also
divine can only develop into something antidivine; under Idealism's
postulate of autonomy, being a son inevitably turns into being an
enemy. Consequently spirit, as that in man which is, in its origin,
divine, is, on account of its autonomy, potentially what impels man
to rebel against the gods. "I am speaking of Prometheus, who on the
one hand is only the principle of Zeus himself and, in contrast to man,
is something divine, a divine element that becomes the origin of man's
intelligence, that confers on him something that had not been granted
to him by the previous world order. ... But over against the divine,
Prometheus is will, which is indomitable and indestructible, and \vhich
is therefore able to withstand the god. "44
A sufficient reason why Christianity (though Schelling would not
have admitted this) is not the logical result of the Old Testament is
that it implies a break with the first of the Ten Commandments.
Schelling seeks to escape this by means of the converse principle:
What is also divine does not fall into rivalry if it satisfies the Trinitarian
conditions: mythical multiplicity is confined by means of dogmatic
unity. That is why Prometheus is "not an idea that a man invented,
he is one of the original ideas that force themselves into existence
and that unfold logically .... " In the still mythical image of the un-
invented original idea, the conflict of gods can be avoided on the
assumption that the (episodically) hostile will is, in its innate logic,.
identical with the will to which it is antagonistic. As a result, Pro-
metheus's long-range, historically universal intentions for the human
species that was present independently of Zeus- "that is, \vhich orig-
inally belonged to a different world order"-would finally converge
with what Zeus himself had wanted when he meant to "put a new
species in place of the present human one." The god of salvation
produces the same mankind that the god of nature, in his rejection
of the actually created species, had in mind.
FroIn the perspective of the end of his story and of history as such,
Prometheus, after all, becomes one of the hypostases of Zeus, the
implication of his desire for a world. "So there was after all something
in Zeus in conformity with which he could not simply not like what
Prometheus had done." No longer only in the sense of the Stoics'
Providence, but also in that of an Idealist total history of spirit, Pro-
metheus is the secret son-still unknown to his father-of Zeus. The
disclosure of his filiation is the completion of the sense of history in
favor of man, the integration of the demiurgic species into a reconciled
universe. Polytheism is not obliterated or even just corrected by Trin-
itarian monotheism, but is decoded by it. For that, too, the "extra-
ordinary saying" provides the diagram: It designates the myth as an
episode of history, and the possibility of that episode as itself myth
556
Part IV
as such, which, in its Trinitarian suspension ~nd continuation [A ujhebung],

merely reveals its hidden logic.
In the young Goethe's Prometheus configuration there is no refuge
whatever for the conjecture that the demiurgic rebel and aesthetic
benefactor of mankind could in all this, after all, have had the job of
carrying out the hidden wishes of Zeus, the father. The Titan's im-
mortality is the rock-hard support for his defiance, just as the child
Johann Wolfgang had thought of immortality in view of the earthquake
of Lisbon. Goethe had no relation to theodicy, as his childish variation
on the sermon about Lisbon already shows; instead of that, his fun-
damental idea will be that God would have had to arrange the world
differently if he had been concerned about man. n That is why, in the
"God against god," there is no secret understanding between the son
and the father.
The fact that the "extraordinary saying" would not only, following
Riemer's presentiment, have "boundless applications" but also fit pre-
cisely, in its [differend readings, into Goethe's argument with himself,
into his self-discovery, leads to the disappointing realization that his
metaphysical gesture promises no single meaning that could be inferred
from a distant source or from a unique instance in which it was put
forward. But we can be reconciled with its ambiguity by the fact that
it is only through it that this gesture remains equal to the forces that
deform this life itself. Thus it also brings us close to the limiting danger
that was concealed in Goethe's predilection for paradoxes - the danger
of dissociation from reality. After Epimenides Awakening-in July 1814;
Y
ZeIter is visiting, the czar is expected - Charlotte von Schiller sees him
in a state "as though he did not find himself at home in the world's
element," in fact, as though he were awakening, like the priest of the
temple, from having mercifully slept through [a period of] history.
What he pronounces resembles the ambiguity that has reached the
stage of boundlessness against which he had to guard his paradoxes:
"Thus he spoke only in sentences that contained a contradiction, so
that one could interpret everything however one wanted to. "45 Could
not one of these sentences have been the "extraordinary saying"?
557
Chapter 4
Translator's Notes
a. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister's travels], which was finally completed only
in 1829, was the sequel to Goethe's autobiographical novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [Wilhelm
Meister's apprenticeship] (I 794-1 796).
b. In the Prometheus fragment that was added to the ode. See the fifth paragraph from the
end of part 4, chapter 2.
c. The Libation Bearers, the second tragedy of the Oresteia trilogy.
d. Lili Schonemann. Goethe's relationship to her is a major theme of Book Four of Dichtung
und Wahrheit.
e. Venetian Epigram no. 66, translated by David Luke in Goethe (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1964), p. 119.
f. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book Four, chapter 20, ed. Scheibe, p. 640.
g. The "Reformation" proposition quoted above and in note 28.
h. See note g.
i. Goethe often compared his cynical friend, Johann Heinrich Merck, to Mephistopheles.
j. A rchaisch here, perhaps in all three senses: (a) old-fashioned, out-of-date, (b) ancient, and (c)
associated with 'the beginnings' (Greek: archai).
k. "If the eye were not sunlike it could not see the sun," in Goethe, trans. Luke, p. 282.
I. Gijttlich can be rendered in English either as "godlike" or as "divine." The latter would be-·
more accurate, but has become so trivialized by its use in vulgar (nowadays often satirical)
grandiloquence that I have generally preferred the former, which still has a certain amount
of dignity attached to it.
m. Since in German every noun is capitalized, the author (like Lenz, whom he is summarizing)
did not face the decision of whether to capitalize Father in these sentences. The English practice
of capitalizing common nouns only when they refer to biblical or other "monotheistic" divinities
requires us to be explicit as to whether our use of such terms is to be taken literally or
metaphorically.
n. This sentence refers to one of Goethe's maxims in Maxims and Reflections (Werke, ed. E. Beutler
[Munich: Artemis, 1948- ], vol. 9, p. 611), which was quoted in The Legitimacy cif the Modern Age
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), p. 244.
Part V
The Titan in His Century
1
Passage through the Philosophy
of History
... the indestructible simply shows itself all the more enduring, the
stronger the blows are that strike it.
-Karl August Varnhagen von Ense
The nineteenth century did not take warning from the example of
Goethe's identification with Prometheus. In a way that was comparable
to no other epoch before it, it comprehended itself in and by means
of the Titan-and not only by means of an aesthetic and allegorical
interpretation of him. Only when Nietzsche rediscovers in Prometheus
the central figure of ancient tragedy, and finds in that figure the
absolute antithesis of the Socratic type, does it become clear that the
century had wagered on Prometheus as the victorious conqueror on
behalf of mankind, the god who invents ways to combat the gods'
playing with men's fortunes; the patriarch of historical self-discovery.
It is not by accident that Burckhardt's posthumous Griechische Kultur-
geschichte [History of Greek culture]- with its assertion, going even
further than Nietzsche, that the Greeks' pessimistic diagnosis of exis-
tence is reflected in the shackled Titan on the Caucasus - was published
almost exactly at the tum of the century. The century had indeed
used the Titan's great gesture of the institution of fire as a Inetaphor
for its own accornplishments, but it had not been able and had not
wanted to bear in mind the gods' jealousy of all earthly happiness, a
jealousy that, according to Burckhardt, permeated the myth. It had
562
Part V
not connected the mythical idea that earthly consummation could

never be anything but "an encroachment on the gods' privilege of
happiness and their perfection"a with the suspicion, or even fear, that
in making himself comfortable in the world man might have to be
prepared for resistance, for limits, or even for objections imposed by
overwhelming force. Burckhardt's description of Greek culture coin-
cided with the eschatological change of mood that accompanied the
fin de siecle. Precisely because the epoch's consciousness of itself was
so firmly associated with the Promethean material, every addition to
what could be perceived in it, such as Nietzsche's and then Burckhardt's,
was bound to seize upon its already acquired 'significance' and to
intensify it to the most penetrating impressiveness.
In the decade in which it was discovered by psychoanalysis, invol-
untary association is the up-to-date symptom of the century's affinity
for the figure of the Titan. Franziska Revendow, later the bohemienne
of the Schwabing 'cosmic' circle,b recounts in one of the letters of her
youth to Emanuel Fehling what happened to her during a class in
teachers' college: "Today we read in Childe Harold that for someone
whose breast was lacerated by the ceaseless vultures (of regret) it was
beneficial to linger by the Rhine. Dr. Ernst asked me who the poet
meant by that; I was far away in my thoughts, and beaming with joy
cried 'Prometheus.' The entire class, even Ernst himself, burst out in
Homeric laughter, and I was deeply ashamed (?). "1 In Byron's narrative
poem the combination of regret, vultures, and the Rhine is found in
the third canto. Stanza 59 sings of the farewell to the Rhine, which
the traveler only reluctantly leaves and the charm of which he describes
by means of the contrast that even one who was afflicted by the most
extreme self-torment could find rest and relief of his agony here.
True, the pilgrim's actual departure is described, but in the greatest
imaginable intensification of what the landscape could bring about for
an unnamed person in the extremity of self-torment. So the young
countess's answer was not at all foolish; the poet alludes to Prometheus,
without comparing his pilgrim to him.
This epic, whose third canto had been written in 1816, in Switzerland,
not only made Byron the romantic hero of the day in the literary
salons of London but also represented Romanticism for the century
in the most effective way, that of required reading in school. The
allusion is confirmed, explicitly, by stanza 163 of the fourth canto:
Prometheus embezzled the lightning bolt, but the artist who exalted
563
Chapter 1
man by representing God in his form, as the Apollo of Belvedere,

cleared away the debt and justified the fire-giver. The Titan's theodicy
is not his suffering, but the fact that God can be represented in man's
form. The hand that created the work of art was animated by the
fire of the lightning. Since this train of thought is central to the poem,
it is impossible that the effect of the romantic landscape of the Rhine
should appear to the poet as describable in any way other than as
being able to provide even a suffering Prometheus with relief But
this sufferer himself has only metaphorical interest. It is no longer the
defiant gesture of the artist who brings forth worlds, as in Sturm und
Drang, that causes the Caucasus to be forgotten, but rather the <;tura
of his work. The tragic quality disappears in it, making it possible for
it to be rediscovered when Romanticism recedes.
It is not the superabundance of examples that makes the century's
affinity for the figure of Prometheus so impressive, but the heightened
intensity of the work on his myth, work that is indicated by the extent
of the deformations, the revisions, the changes of genre, and the drive
to achieve definitive unsurpassability. There is also, as evidence of the
energy involved in the relationship, a sort of pressure to fill the role:
Anyone who did not entitle himself "Prometheus" allowed someone
else to do it. The periodical to which Goethe had promised his Pandora,
in 1807, is the initial exhibit in a huge collection, as the delayed
showpiece of which we also have "Australopithecus prometheus,"
whose possesion of fire-asserted by his discoverer, Dart, in 1948-
later, ironically, had to be disallowed, because the black coloring at
the location of the find, in the cave at Makapansgat, could be explained
by other means.
As the allegorical and emblematic interpretive procedures - but also
etiological explanations tracing myths back to prehistoric events-
ceased to be generally accepted, the position defined by the Prometheus
material had become vacant, less definite in function and capable of
being occupied in various ways. Perhaps the key to this ambiguity is
the discovery that Diderot made as early as 1 774 in his refutation of
Helvetius's anthropology.2 This consisted in the simple statement that
there have been many men like Ixion or Prometheus, and equally
many vultures that have lacerated them. In the context this means
that the situation that creates a need for Prometheus continually recurs,
that it is in fact constitutive for man's history, as a continuity of work
that could not be kept in motion by onetime gifts. That, Diderot says,
564
Part V
is the business of those who allow themselves to be broken on the

Ixion's wheel of the sharpest attention, whom the vulture of lack-
once it has been recognized - unceasingly attacks. The pluralization
of Prometheus follows from a philosophy of history: Progress does
not alter the situation of the individual who is ready to push it forward,
because his vulture is the plague of ideas and of the exertion directed
at each next step. Diderot thinks he finds in Helvetius the implication
that a fruitful idea resembles, in its accidental character, the tile that
detaches itself from the roof and falls on someone's head. This is what
is left of [the idea ofl inspiration, even if it presents itself under a more
modest name; whereas Diderot sees the omnipresence of Prometheus
and his vulture in history as excluding accidents from it. Of course
the fact that history plagues man does not justify Rousseau's criticism
that he could and should have a voided it.
Rousseau, according to Diderot, did a poor job of upholding the
original, savage condition against the social one. He failed to note that
it is fear that, like Prometheus's vulture, propels the work of culture.
If Rousseau had been willing to imagine a type of society that appeared
still half savage and already half civilized, then it would have been
more difficult to reply to his argument. Men came together in order
to combat their constant enemy, nature. They were not satisfied to
defeat her- they wanted to triumph over her as well. They found a
hut more comfortable than a cave, and when they had a hut, they
aspired to a palace. Diderot believes that there is a limit to the process
of civilization, a limit that accords with man's happiness and that is
by no means as far removed from the state of savagery as people
. .
ImagIne.
The question, he says, is only how one could return to this limit,
when one has overstepped it, and how one could remain at it when
one has arrived there. We will have to think of the great stock-taking
of the Encyclopedia as part of the answer to this question. But it hardly
still permits the utopia of the hypothesis: If, somewhere on earth, one
could make a fresh beginning, perhaps it would be possible "to find
a mean that would retard Prometheus's son's steps forward [progres],
protect him from the vulture and fix civilized man between the child-
ishness of the savage and our decrepitude." Mankind must be protected,
not from Prometheus and his sons, but from the vultures that urge
them on. That is a subtle shift of the accent in the configuration, from
the sons of Prometheus to the vultures - a shift of which the following
565
Chapter 1
century was not to take notice, however natural it may remain, even
with Diderot's pluralization of the Prometheus story.
When one considers that the founder of the Encyclopedia wrote this
almost at the same time that the "Prometheus" article of its thirteenth
volume, published in 1765, was being written, the pressure of the
conceptualization of a philosophy of history, which leads to the aban-
donment of the aesthetic features of the mythical figure, becomes
evident. It is not by accident that a century later the historian of France
saw in Diderot himself the true Prometheus, who created more than
works: He created men, and breathed his animating breath over France
and over Germany (being more influential in the latter, through Goethe,
than in the former).3 Admittedly, Goethe cannot have been acquainted
with Diderot's Titan of the work of history when he shifted the Pro-
metheus of his early ode from his artist's workshop under the open
sky into the smith's caves of Pandora, because the text of the Refutation
of Helvitius was not available to him and to his contemporaries for the
greater part of the century. It was published for the first time in
Assezat's edition of Diderot in 1875.
At that time Nietzsche had discovered a new aesthetic function for
Prometheus, that of typifying the opposite of the Socratic divergence
from the veracity of the tragic consciousness, and thus at the same
time also typifying the opposite of the spirit of the waning century.
What had been unmistakable in the suffering figure of the historical
doer as he appeared in Diderot-namely, myth's permanent unspoken
thought that for every gain and every achievement a price has to be
paid-becomes incompatible with the regaining of tragic authenticity,
of the incomparable immanence of the mythical figure. True, Diderot
had pointed to the impetus behind history, whose operation puts
Rousseau in the wrong, when he said that it is fear that drives man
out of the supposed paradise of his initial naturalness; but he could
have added that it also drives him out of the antiparadise of the tragic
self-conception as the refusal of history.
The transformation of the suffering Prometheus into the triumphant
one, of the Titan into the Olympian, takes place, as it were, on the
quiet. When Max Klinger conceives his polychrome monument to
Beethoven with the features of a Prolnetheus, it finally becolnes-
beyond the period of its genesis - a Zeus on a pedestal of rock, at
whose feet an eagle has alighted, which looks up at the genius \vith
arnber eyes. This monument, which was at first rnuch admired and
566
Part V
then very quickly scorned as a "conglo~erate," and which not only

dealt with the power [Krcift] of genius but was itself a 'feat of strength'
['Krciftakt'], was the product of preliminary studies extending across
seventeen years. The plaster model that was made in Paris in 1885
still exhibits the comparison of the composer with Prometheus, a
conception that had already been canonized by the Vienna monument
by Kaspar Clemens von Zumbusch that was unveiled in 1880. The
Verein Beethovenhaus [Beethoven House Association] in Bonn acquired
Klinger's first model in 1937 and exhibited it in the summerhouse
erected specifically for that purpose in the yard of the memorial from
which it takes its name. As times and tastes changed, the model was
finally shown only on special request, since visitors had long ceased
to be interested in such things, or even regarded them as beneath
them. Times and tastes having continued to change, in 1977 the Leipzig
Museum of Fine Arts is again able to put the monument, for the first
time since the Second World War, in its collection on display. The
great museums of Europe scramble for the right to be able to show
this still, in fact, scorned product of an esoteric aesthetics and an
overstrained cult of genius, in the Klinger exhibitions they now have
to put on.
The crisis of this tum of the century, which likes to paint itself in
apocalyptic colors, must be examined over and over again in the light
of the programs that had been furnished for the century as it was
beginning. On account of its gradual dissemination, I have still counted
among these the French Encyclopedia, with its characteristic 'realism,'
which carried the work further than its authors' philosophical programs
could ever have foreseen. To see this one must study not so much
the articles in the text as rather the volumes of plates, which document
a new intensiveness and extensiveness of observation and which made
distinctly visible things that the perfected world of illustrations in mod-
em encyclopedias runs together again. The parade of cultural gains
in the pictorial part of the Encyclopedia, which, with its interweaving
(induced by alphabetical order) of instruments of self-preservation and
means of self-presentation, makes the user forget Rousseau's problem
of the incendiary effect of fire from heaven, legitimizes what is by
reference to what can be in the future. In doing so it makes what
could throw doubt on the origin of this inalienable stock seem insig-
nificant. The suggestion that the fire stolen from heaven might not
be pure already belongs to the process of the Enlightenment's going
567
Chapter 1
beyond itself, which unites Rousseau and Kant. Rousseau did not
provide any theory of why mankind was not satisfied, in the moderate
light of reason, with its naked self-preservation; but Kant was to show
that the principle of self-preservation already contains the principle
of going beyond oneself- that reason already contains the potential
of its "pure" use. There is such a thing as the Rousseauism of reason,
and Kant's critique is the high point not only of the Enlightenment
but also of its self-demarcation against exuberance and excess, against
the claim-nourished by its consciousness of success-to totality.
One of his last publications in the Berliner Monatsschrift [Berlin
monthly], in 1 796, still protests not so much against "a refined tone
that has recently arisen in philosophy," as its title says, but rather
against reason's behaving like a thief as soon as it wants to make
visible more, or pretends to be able to see more, with its light, than
is a vital necessity for it. It seems to have become necessary for the
critique of reason to attend to the office of a "police in the realm of
the sciences," a police that must not tolerate seeing what can be
attained through work neglected in the name of a philosophy of im-
mediate intuition and thus of pure presumption. Everything is per-
missible, Kant concedes, as a means of enriching the parsimonious
formalism of a philosophy of law with supporting feelings, but this
can only be "ex post," after the "brazen voice" of duty has first been
heard. Here we again encounter Jacobi. What he had offered-a
philosophy that founded morality on feeling- has to be rejected, Kant
says, however desirable it is to enliven by every means that has first
been established rationally. It is the "death of all philosophy" when
it does more than bring the law to conceptual clarity, and in "enthu-
siastic vision" seeks the aesthetic mode of representation involving
personification and mythicization, so as to turn "the reason that issues
moral commands into a veiled Isis," and make the logically explicable
"presentiment of a law" into the ambiguous "voice of an oracle."
This metaphor enables Kant to refer back to Fontenelle's treatise,
which had inaugurated the Enlightenment, on the falling silent of the
oracles.
Kant attributes to the new Platonists, Schlosser, Jacobi, and Stolberg,
the claim to have kindled their light of Enlightenment from Plato
himself- who, however, was unable to state what his light consisted
of and "what was enlightened [or "clarified": aujgeklart] by it." Since
the origin of the new light of reason becomes, in this \vay, a n1ystcry,
Plato permits his disciples to assert, with<?ut being contradicted, that
it is a light derived from a higher source. Precisely at this point Kant's
thought leaps from Plato to Prometheus. "But so much the better!"
Kant makes his new Platonists exclaim: "Because then it is obvious
that he, a second Prometheus, wrested [entwandt] the spark for this
light directly from heaven."4 Wrested [entwunden] or stole [entwendet]?C
If the bringer of light, that "supposed Plato," cannot define the en-
lightening effect of his light, it is natural to suspect that it derives not
from a higher mystery but from illegitimate recourse to an 'immediacy'
that belongs only to the gods.
Of course, in one of the final years of the century of the Enlight-
enment' this is a text of resignation. The fact that more than a decade
after the critique of reason d a philosophy of feeling was still, or again,
possible was bound to escape the comprehension of one who thought
he had made the success of the Enlightenment final by defining its
limits. This situation is reflected, at the end of Kaht's experience with
the effects of reason, by the problematic savior figure of Prometheus.
The name that Kant attaches, in this way, to his late disappointment
points back across almost half a century to his earliest attempt to come
to grips with the very great expectations that had become attached
to scientific reason in mankind's coming to grips with nature and that
had undergone their crisis as a result of the earthquake at Lisbon.
Kant commented three times, in the Ko·nigsberger Wochenzeitung [Kon-
igsberg weekly news], on this natural phenomenon, which had provoked
the six-year-old Goethe's 'theodicy.' In the "fragility of the ground
under our feet," as Kant calls it, the most extreme destabilization of
the one taken-for-granted constant of our life-world, the ground under
our feet that supports us, suddenly became manifest. As was to be
expected, the great alarm called forth bringers of salvation, among
them the Gottingen professor (and member of the academy there),
Hollmann, who proposed making a vent for the subterranean forces
by boring holes in the earth's crust.
In this matter Kant relies on a "certain correct taste in natural
science," which he thinks is guided by a belief in "man's incapacity"
vis-a.-vis the elementary powers of nature. Kant does not have complete
confidence even in the lightning rod, which had just been invented
and had immediately been installed by Reimarus's son on the Jacobi
Church in Hamburg, as a symbol of the triumph of the Enlightenment.
For hilTI, the offers to deprive the earthquake, like the lightning bolt,
of its power, come under the name of the Titan to whom, as the first
in the series of the great inventors and conquerors of the fear of
unknown powers, Benjamin Franklin had been brought into relation,
although he hardly suspected, as yet, the future usefulness of this
tamed power of nature: "From the Prometheus of modem times,
Mr. Franklin, who wanted to disarm the thunder, to the person who
wants to extinguish the fire in Vulcan's workshop, all such efforts are
evidence of man's daring, which is joined to a capacity that is very
small in proportion to it, and finally lead him to the humbling rec-
ollection-with which he would have done well to begin-that he is,
after all, never anything more than a man."5 Reason, in its human
condition, is not satisfied. It tugs at its restrictions-not yet, as in the
critique of reason of the 1780s, because it wants to be "pure" and
cannot choose anything else whatever without a feeling of loss, but
still as an agency of power in relation to nature - as a way of securing
success in life, as the Cartesian "marcher avec assurance en cette vie"
[to walk with confidence, in this lifeJ. Before he contradicted reason's
arrogance of purity, Kant had brought doubt to bear on its epochal
program of reincarnating Prometheus.
Historical caesuras, new beginnings, cannot be posited without the
asserted worthlessness of what had preceded the claimed break be-
coming a burden to the subject that is supposed to have made the
new beginning. If reason itself ascribes to itself the necessity of a new
beginning, it must face the question what else, then, what other agency,
could have been responsible for the intolerable state that went before
it. Where subject and reason assert their identity with one another,
the desire for justice to the totality of history must become over-
whelming. As soon as the ingenuousness of the zero point has dis-
appeared, the question takes shape: What, then, did mankind do
before, and how (if that is what happened) did it deprive itself of its
rational equipment so as to become so much in need of emancipations?
Seen from this point of view, Romanticism and historicism are not
phenomena of mere reaction against [the Enlightenment'sJ cheerlessness
[UngemutlichkeitJ, but are answers to the embarrassment of contin-
gency-aggravated by the century of reason-that belongs to the
modem age, which had enough to do in any case to make the Middle
Ages "dark" and to win the querellec with the ancient world. Insofar
as, finally, the French Revolution enacted the epoch's claim only phe-
notypically, it brought the necessary cOlllplement out of the \vings:
Part V
its [own] ROlnantic, Napoleon, as well as the Romanticism that rebels

against him. .
Part of the question that Romanticism posed about the unity of
history's subject-a subject that has not yet taken on the solidity of
the "world spirit" -is the question whether the oldest poetical materials
could be not only preserved but renewed, under changed circumstances.
This inevitably becomes a further experiment with the constancy and
hard-wearingness of the ancient myths. Friedrich Schlegel's program
for Romanticism, in his Dialogue on Poetry, asks itself the question
whether something like the ancient tragedies could ever be produced
again. Toward the end of the first version, written in 1800, the answer
is that if the mysteries and mythology were first "rejuvenated by the
spirit of physics," it could become possible to compose tragedies "in
which everything is ancient, and which yet would be certain to capture
the sense of the age through the meaning."6
Rejuvenation by the spirit of physics - that is not the subjugation
of poetry to the scientific spirit of the modern age, but more nearly
the expectation of a different physics, which could make possible
relationships of reciprocal influence and which had already been pro-
claimed in Novalis's speculations. Among the mythical themes that
would be capable of such rejuvenation, the Camilla of the dialogue
wishes for a Niobe, Antonio for the myth of Apollo and Marsyas,
which seems to him "very timely," or indeed "probably always timely
in any well-composed literature," and Marcus comes to the lapidary
conclusion: "I would much rather ask for a Prometheus." No reasons
are given, but it is natural to see the common denominator of the
chosen themes in the fact that they would each, in their way, serve
to express the fate of the artist and of art, because that is the only
thing that can still take on tragic dimensions.
In Schlegel's revision of the dialogue for the 1823 edition of his
works, the talk is no longer of the rejuvenation of myth by the spirit
of physics. Of Prometheus, we now read: "This thinking Titan, as he
forms his men in defiance of the gods, is really a model for the modern
artist and poet, in his struggle against an adverse destiny or a hostile
environment."7 The Ludovico of the dialogue knows how to convert
that immediately into a stage allegory, which shows Prometheus, the
exemplary, in his actual situation: "Instead of the rocks of the Caucasus
you can have the new Prometheus shackled and chained to the stage
of any of our theaters; there he will lose his Titanic arrogance." That
reminds one of Karl Moor's scornful comment on the contemporary
fate of everything Titanic: "Prometheus's flaming spark of light has
burnt out, and in its place people now use the flame from club-moss
powder - a theater fire that cannot light a pipe of tobacco. " f
For Romanticism to be able to integrate the myth into itself, it is
crucial that it should be able to carry out on it part of the recovery
of the identity of the single historical subject - the rediscovery of the
single language of mankind, which would be spoken and understood
even across the break between epochs. The place of the first version's
rejuvenation by physics has been taken by a postulated philosophy
of life: "If the inner natural meaning of the old saga of the gods and
heroes, the sound of which reaches us on the magic stream of imag-
ination as the giant voice of the primeval age - if this meaning will
be more closely revealed for us, and will be renewed for us, too, and
rejuvenated, by the spirit of a philosophy that is itself alive and that
also understands life clearly: then it will be possible to compose tragedies
in which everything is ancient, and which yet would be certain to
capture the sense of the age through the meaning." Philosophy has
become the agency of that sought-for identity; it grasps the possibilities
that come down, preformed in the stream of history, for each age.
The renewal of myth within Idealism is not a simple task, because
Idealism is itself a myth. That a story has to be told about the spirit,
a story that can only be imprecisely surmised on the basis of the actual
history of ideas, is also part of the attempt to overcome the contingency
that oppresses the self-consciousness of the modem age. In that effort,
the philosophical 'isms' appear like actors in a world-encompassing
story: "Idealism in any form must transcend itself in one way or
another, in order to be able to return to itself and remain what it is.
Therefore, there must and will arise from the matrix of Idealism a
new and equally infinite realism, and Idealism will not only by analogy
of its genesis be an example of the new mythology, but it will indirectly
become its very source. "il The pattern followed by such a story is
independent of the fact that Friedrich Schlegel wants the term Idealism
to be understood in an epistemologically unspecific sense, as a char-
acterization of the spirit of the age and without regard to the "scientific
error admixed" with it. As such, it is, above all, a rneans of self-
protection against the charge of Spinozism.
In the context of this passage of the prograrnmatic \vork, \vhich
was struck out in the second version, to talk of Prolnet.heus as the
572
Part V
Idealist is without hubris: "So at present I.do not expect the Idealist,
like a new Prometheus, to want to place the power of the divine
single-handedly in his own ego, since in any case this Titanic arrogance
and error cannot spread far, and must automatically call forth its
antithesis." It looks like the formula for the actual history that-
between Goethe's early Prometheus and his late Pandora, 1 773 and 1806,
on either side of the date of the Romantic program-has already
almost run its course and will soon present itself as the symmetry of
Prometheus and Epimetheus.
It is not Prometheus's defiance of Olympus that fails, but rather
Idealism's test of itself in the same endeavor. That which time and
again calls itself realism is engendered by the disappointments of the
programs that are its forerunners - in the same way, even the nihilism
that Nietzsche extols will be only the extreme form resulting from
the disappointment of an unsurpassable demand for a trustworthy
reality [for Soliditat]. Idealism's interpretation of itself as aesthetic can
be regarded as an anticipatory way of avoiding disappointments, insofar
as the exit into the aesthetic realm creates the purest form of irre-
futability. Paradoxically, aestheticizing the world makes its reality su-
perfluous, since it would always be even more beautiful merely to
have imagined it. When perception itself takes on the characteristics
of an aesthetic action, what is by its nature improbable is lost in the
uniformity of everything. In the Jena lectures on transcendental phi-
losophy of 1800-1801, this consequence is blocked only by the fact
that the world is presented as "incomplete." Room is left for an
artificiality that is equivalent to nature: "Man, as it were, conlposes
[dichtet] the world, only he does not immediately know it."9 Since there
is nothing whatever left for him to do but to compose it, he ceases
to have any Promethean character. With the ease and impunity of
the gesture of creation, defiance and suffering no longer have any
function. It is logical that the history that is restored to its unbroken
identity under the favor of all the gods makes mythical founding acts
of rebellion and deception nonsensical.
Accordingly, the myth sinks back to the level where its etiological
origins could be conjectured to lie. In the Vienna lectures on the
philosophy of history of 1828, Friedrich Schlegel now sees the Pro-
metheus story only as a myth of the origin of the Greeks, in which
they continue to perceive vaguely their derivation from a Caucasian
race who had everywhere displaced and oppressed, but had never
573
Chapter 1
entirely exterminated the original Pelasgian inhabitants of Greece. The

Titan on the Caucasus is an ethnic protagonist. His myth no longer
belongs in the typology of the Enlightenment, for whose concept of
reason this kind of story of descent and migration would have been
a matter of indifference. Now "descent" means that reason wants to
reclaim the background of its history, the sources of the unified stream
flowing through time. The philosophy of history is the interpretation
of remembrance, as the most distant accessible figure of which the
Caucasian ancestor, Prometheus, stands out. He is not only a progenitor,
but, above all, the receiver and bearer of an original revelation, of
the precise opposite of a theft of fire. Mankind's archaic dowry was
preserved by means of a tradition that is continually threatened by
incomprehension, and in cryptic forms, in such a way that its Romantic
regeneration turns out to be more a surmise than an interpretation.
In the first of the Vienna lectures, the unity of the human race, as
a precondition of this hidden tradition, becomes a condition of the
possibility of a philosophy of history. So that "the hidden light of an
eternal origin" can be enclosed in all men, room cannot be allowed
to the myth of autochthonous people, who are supposed to have
sprung up everywhere from the fertile mud of the earth. Prometheus
is the figure opposed to that. He is the progenitor, furnished with
wisdom, of all men, though also of the Greeks in particular. "Now
this quite universal human belief in Prometheus's heavenly light, or
however else one wants to designate it, in our heart is in fact the only
thing we may presuppose here, and which we must everywhere take
as our point of departure. "10 The 'transcendental' character of the
pattern of thought is manifest: With the opposite view, "no history
at all, and no science of history, is possible."
Then everything inevitably is concentrated on presenting Prome-
theus's theft of fire as the great misunderstanding of the myth, as
uncomprehension of an original act almost of [divine] grace. He did
not steal what had been entrusted to him as a historical property for
mankind: "So Prometheus's divine spark in the human breast, \vhen
it is characterized more accurately and sharply and expressed more
historically, depends on the word that was originally given to man
and inborn and entrusted and communicated to him as that in \vhich
his most characteristic essence, his spiritual dignity and also his higher
destination, consists, and from which it results." II
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Part V
It is not by accident that Schlegel repeatedly calls the philosophy

of history that is founded on the "principle of [man's] likeness to God"
the "legitimate" world view. Here it is not the enlightenments that
have destroyed the identity of the tradition; the idea that reason would
first have to find Ifinden], if not invent [e1jinden], itself had only been
made possible by the historical subject's loss of identity, when it was
not really able to fix a "proper beginning" for itself or, correspondingly,
a "proper end" either. It had surrendered its definite outline. Ro-
manticism projects the legitimacy problematic of the period following
the Revolution onto world-historical dimensions. The plurality of in-
trahistorical positings of 'substance' is replaced by a single archaic act
of establishment, a treasure handed down in tradition - analogous to
theology's depOSitum fidei [store of faith]-for which the name of a
blessed [begnadeten] (rather than a pardoned [begnadigtenD Prometheus
brings with it the potential energy of an unbaptized 'significance.' In
the seventh lecture Prometheus serves to distinguish man's substantial
likeness to God from what appears, in myth, as a merely external
finding of a convenient form: "But the divine image in man does not
consist, for example, in a passing ray of light, like a lightning bolt, or
in individual thoughts, but in Prometheus's kindling spark.... " 12
The other Schlegel, August Wilhelm, published a poetic renewal of
the Prometheus material in Schiller's Musen-Almanach [Muses' almanac]
for 1 798, even before his brother's program for Romanticism. It is
certainly the most verbose and tedious product of consideration of
this myth; but it gives an opportunity, in passing, to study still another
variant of Goethe's art of keeping silent. The poem's expansiveness
permits 'observations' regarding the myth that have to be seen as
correctives to its employment in Sturm und Drang. For August Wilhelm,
what we inherit in the myth is already the prehistory of a consolidated
Idealism of freedom, no longer that of a defiance that enjoys itself.
o goldne Zeit, auf ewig hingeschwund,en!
Wie suss bethort es, deine feme Spur
In alter Sanger Spriichen zu erkunden!
[0 golden age, vanished forever! How delightfully beguiling it is to
search out your remote traces in the sayings of old singers!]
Whatever else may follow, this beginning has to cite the Romantic
Prometheus, because philological duty has already become too strong
to allo\v one to deform too much of the inherited picture. It is the
age of the Titans themselves that glimmers so golden in the distance,
as it cannot glimmer for any classicism; the power of fatherly Cronus
is precipitately interrupted by Zeus's seizure of power. It is the childhood
of men, which the bound Titan recalls in a dialogue with his mother,
who here (significantly) is Themis. With the fall of the Titans, the
situation had become serious for man:
Dich aber, Mensch! erheb' ich tiber dich.
Die goldne Kindheit darf nicht wiederkehren,
Die dir im weichen Schooss der Lust verstrich.
Drum Ierne handeln, schaffen und entbehren! 13
[But you, man, I elevate above yourself. Your golden childhood, which
slipped by in the soft lap of pleasure, cannot return. So learn to act,
to create, and to do without!]
What Prometheus has to do is 'adjust' man to the post-Titanic age.
A new kind of self-preservation is called for; to "form" it, in the
metaphorical sense, is Prometheus's scheme. His creative activity is
described no more clearly than Idealist philosophy described the cre-
ative activity of the subject, which, by virtue of its derivation from
Kant's Transcendental Deduction,g is supposed to combine the pro-
duction of necessary conditions with the conditions of a free aesthetic
project. But how is freedom supposed to consist of something that
has, after all, always already been settled, behind the back of the
subject who experiences himself, and that never determines his inner
experience and self-consciousness? "0 Sohn! du bist von Schopfer-
wahne trunken!" [0 son, you are drunk with the delusion of creation!]
is mother Themis's weak protest against the Idealist contemporaries
of this Prometheus of 1 798. But the delusion of creation is not restricted
to the Promethean figure; it reaches its climax in the reflexiveness of
creation, in self-creation. This is the manifestation of what ProInetheus
himself describes as his "joy in deeds": His creature, he says, emerging
by way of "the nights of error," is the creature who "was created
only to create himself" Zeus "chose" the world and he, Prometheus,
chose man-that is the formula for the conflict both bet\veen ancient
and modern and between cosmocentric and anthropocentric
rnetaphysics.
So that this can be entirely and without pretense a history of rnan's
freedom, the primary concern of the Titan as he anticipates his pun-
ishment must be the question of whether man would be affected,
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Part V
along with him, by the demonstration of Zeus's power. Themis's verdict

on this question is based solely on the fact that even power must
submit to fate, so that Zeus can do nothing that destiny prohibits to
him:
Zeus kann die Bildnerei dir bitter lohnen,
Doch hemmen darf er nicht was sie erzielt.
[Zeus can repay you severely for your sculptor's work, but he may
not obstruct what it produces.]
That is the central sentence of the poem. At the same time, it is a
weak spot, because the appeal to fate cannot be translated into Ide-
alism's language of self-creation. One could say that this poetic weakness
also makes it evident why Idealism of this kind could not satisfy the
new century. It makes unintelligible the core of a self-conciousness
that sees the irrevocability of its own achievements as the guarantee
of its historical invulnerability. So, in Schlegel's poem it is only reliance
on Themis' s promise that fate sets a limit to power that makes Pro-
metheus ready to suffer his punishment.
Wanting to give the poem to Schiller's Musen-Almanach, Schlegel
sent it to Goethe, because Schiller was Goethe's guest at the time.
One can assume that Schlegel, like Schiller, had a very accurate idea
of Goethe's affinity to this material. Schiller had written to Komer in
April 1795 that Goethe was occupied with a tragedy in the ancient
Greek style, whose subject was supposed to be the liberation of Pro-
metheus; and as late as June 18, 1 797, one month before his visit in
Weimar, he begs Goethe: "Do not forget to send me the chorus from
Prometheus." We know nothing beyond these hints about such a plan
for a tragedy in the 1 790s. One can imagine with what curiosity Schiller
awaited Goethe's reaction to another writer's "Prometheus," but how
Goethe too was conscious of this sort of expectation in the others.
His reaction is, if nothing else, perfection of understatement. He
writes to Schlegel in a manner of the utmost indifference, as though
he had never been involved with this material: "By sending me your
'Prometheus,' you have put me in a position to entertain my guest in
a very agreeable manner. ... " They had both, he says, read the poem
repeatedly and with pleasure. Schlegel had succeeded in "endowing
the myth with a deep meaning and expressing it in a serious and
noble way .... " Furthermore, the verses were very successful, con-
taining passages of surprising sublimity, and the whole would be "one
577
Chapter 1
of the leading ornaments of the Almanac."14 No reminiscence of his

own experiments with Prometheus, no warning of the explosive power
of the subject that, though harmlessly versified here, nevertheless
surpassed Goethe's conception with its 'creativist' interpretation. The
coolness that emanates from such conventional phrases can hardly be
attributed to the fact that here someone who certainly had to know
what he was doing was competing with Goethe's treatment of the
same material. Rather, we should assume that, not having found access
to the reformulation of the Prometheus material that will be presented
a decade later in Pandora, he nevertheless already was unmoved by
the high-spirited talk of creator and creation-that he no longer trusted
the demiurgic register. The fact that Schlegel's poem, which is hardly
stimulating any longer, tested Goethe in this regard allows it never-
theless to retain its place in history.
It is only close to the middle of the century that Prometheus's
installation as the figuration of the philosophy of history is completed.
This occurs with Schelling's Berlin lectures on the philosophy of my-
thology in 1842 and 1845.
Schelling's point of departure is Aristotle's doctrine of the "active
intellect," which was such a source of irritation for the Christian tra-
dition. The fact that the "active intellect" had been assigned the attribute
of divinity meant, for Aristotle, as much and as little as it meant for
the Greeks in general, but it arrests Schelling's attention. Aristotle, he
says, did not explain the meaning of his assertion that the nus pOietikos
["active intellect," in Greek] operates on the cognitive faculty from
without, and where this operation comes from. This unclarity then
gave the Arabs the opportunity to give priority to the unity of the
intellectus agens ["active intellect," in Latin], over consideration of its
divinity. The fact that this was not a capricious decision, because the
unity of the active intellect merely represented a necessary condition
of its function in establishing universally valid truths for individual
subjects, cannot interest Schelling a great deal. Given the way he uses
these terms, it is natural to assume that the intellect, if it is divine,
cannot be God, in which case it can be the "divine" only against God.
Then it is no great step further to say that "the antidivine is also that
which can put itselfin God's place. "15 That thought is hardly in keeping
with myth; more nearly with Luther. In the mythical polycracy [rule
of Inany], one god can be against the other without this having the
let.hal implication that the divine, as something that is, in each case,
578
Part V
uniquely so, can only exist by means of the annihilation of everything

else that also wants to be this. In polytheism, what is against a god is,
in order to be this, also a god, but it is not the 'antidivine.' So meta-
physical dualism is not the threat that arises from the reduction of a
polytheism; rather, it is produced by the self-cleavage of a monotheism
that cannot handle the problem of vindicating its God against the
reproach that his world is not in keeping with his concept.
Schelling makes his Aristotle stop short of this threat with his doctrine
of the active intellect: With it, he had "come to a boundary that he
was not to cross." It seems beyond question to Schelling that he saw
him thus also "arrived at the boundary of what ancient philosophy
was capable of." The fact that with the idea of the active intellect
Aristotle had said something ultimate about the soul could be gathered
already from the way he "is seized by an unusual afflatus of almost
Platonic enthusiasm."
Philosophy had had its origin in the turning away from myth, and
it is not an easy matter for it to cross the boundary into the realm of
possible stories again. But what is much more important is the fact
that Aristotle had no reason to vindicate his God on account of the
world or in relation to anything else, because his world was eternal
and depended on this God only in respect to its motion, which, however,
it provided for itself through its eros. Only when a creator God, in
the ultimate logic of his self-defense, is driven into a comer and obliged
not to let his creation lack anything, will he finally make the world
his equal, as in Giordano Bruno. At the same moment it will become
his enemy, since it has already drawn to itself all the attributes of
divinity and leaves no remainder of its transcendent origin, but swallows
it up in its own infinitude.
A substantial distortion of historical perspective is needed in order
to perceive any conflict of this sort in Aristotelian metaphysics. Only
when that "active intellect," on this side of or beyond its theoretical
function of generating universal validity, is conceived as an elementary
willing-namely, a willing of itself-does a potential for metaphysical
conflict arise.
Schelling's "will of the will" ["Wille des Willens"], whose boyish im-
pertinence consists in nothing else but the fact "that it has its own
will," is, in its tum, only the common element in all acts of volition,
the freedom that controls caprice by not tolerating the contradiction
that is involved in an action that conflicts with the very possibility of
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Chapter 1
caprice. But why could this "will of the will" not be satisfied to will
itself in the way that, in that same Aristotle, the unmoved mover, free
of all needs, was one with himself by having nothing to think but
himself? The question that one hardly dared put to this thought of
thought-what, then, it actually thinks-can be addressed less rev-
erently to the "will of the will" as the question what, then, it actually
wills. The reason for the greater ease of the latter question is that the
will can only will itself if it does this implicitly in the process of willing
something else that contains the potential of a contradiction to its
ability to will itself-just as talk of self-preservation only makes sense
as long as there is a possibility of losing oneself. The world, as the
sum of everything that the self is not, is at the same time the sum of
everything that, as an object of the will, creates a reason for the "will
of the will" by acting as a diversion and a threat. Thus the will, in
contrast to the supposed thought of thought, comes to itself only by
wa y of the world.
And that is its essentially Idealistic quality. The philosophy of Idealism
is a philosophy of roundabout routes. The absolute cannot remain by
itself; it must come to itself by way of something other than itself.
This means, in Schelling's words (which project it, historically erro-
neously, onto Aristotle's "active intellect"): "Therefore, the spirit must
set about knowing things; it does not exist, it comes into being as
understanding .... " This is "essentially what Aristotle also indicates."
Having systematically prepared his listener in this way, Schelling
now lets him consider Prometheus as the image (rising up as though
surreptitiously and by chance) of the terrible detour that the divine
has to take, by way of the antidivine, in order to come-at all, and
ever- to itself. The affinity between Idealism's roundabout route and
Prometheus does not immediately leap to view, because it requires
us to consider the configuration from Zeus's point of view. Only no\\!
that he has set up Prometheus as an antidivine principle, sent hilTI
a wa y to be tortured, and allowed his own scion to liberate him, has
the quality of Zeus's power achieved a finality that is worthy of a god.
Something that has hardly ever been treated as important in the
reception of the myth - the fact that this cousin of Zeus had been his
ally in the struggle for power with the Titans - unexpectedly gains
declaratory power in Schelling's allegorical interpretation in terms of
the equivocal character of spirit [Geist, here = "intellect" in Aristotle].
Only because Prometheus has the same divine origin can he represent
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Part V
"the principle of Zeus himself' to men .as something external and

foreign to them, something not inherent in their being, and make it
penetrate them "from outside," like Aristotle's nus pOietikos [active
intellect}. Prometheus represents what, according to Schelling's re-
proach, had escaped Aristotle: Aristotle had "recognized the divine,
but had not given equal recognition to the antidivine, although the
two are inseparable."
Representing not Zeus but Zeus's principle, Prometheus becomes
the self-will that opposes the divine and is invincible for it. As such,
he becomes the "principle of mankind." The fundamental idea is that
a mediator figure between god and men cannot be something inter-
mediate, but necessarily becomes antidivine.
One is, first of all, amazed that this function is not seen in the figure
of Hercules instead. As the hitherto most potent son of Zeus, Hercules
does not fear his displeasure when he kills the god's eagle and deprives
Prometheus's punishment of its severity. In the ancient myth of Her-
cules, the extent of possible rebelliousness against Zeus was nowhere
near to being exhausted. Otherwise Zeus could not have been on the
way to a new procreation when the culprit's revelation {purchased by
his release} that Zeus would produce a rival who would overthrow
him, this time, made it plain that he should refrain. Only the anonymous
unbegotten one would have been the extreme case of the principle
of antidivinity-the image of the god's self-deprivation of power. If
it does not come to that, then it is at the cost not only of Prometheus's
definitive release but also of the restriction of Zeus's power by nothing
other than - and nothing less than - the history of an unloved mankind.
Schelling cannot view Hercules and the unbegotten one in this way,
because Hercules is the son, and as such the final and the last. He
has to be elevated to something greater than disobedience to the
father-god.
If Aristotle had named that aspect of the spirit [or intellect] "divine"
which is the antithesis of an Idealist "history"-namely, its exemption
from any disposition to a story-then the question arises how an
emergence from that self-satisfaction nevertheless comes about. For
Schelling, philosophy is not able on its own, by its own dynamic, to
overstep the limit at which Aristotle had stopped. It first had to be
told, "from outside," that the world is only a condition and not an
essence [ein ((Seyn))]; that, in other words, it is not "something with
which we are unconditionally confronted," but rather something that
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Chapter 1
is made episodic by the fact that, according to the apostle's promise,

"the fashion of this world passes away. "h It follows logically, then,
that the world, as soon as it becomes the mere interim of God's relation
to himself, makes more demands on its both creative and destroying
God than the Stagirite's eternal cosmos does, and at the same time
possesses less authentic and autochthonous reliability than what is
uncreated.
This establishment of Idealism on the basis of the New Testament
is the most daring part of Schelling's mythology. It sticks to the biblical
mode of speech, designated the visible world as "this world" and
attaching to it the clear suggestion that it is a world that is "posited
together with the present human consciousness and as transitory as
it is." Consequently, Idealism can only be a post -Christian concept;
it "belongs completely to the new world, and needs to make no secret
of the fact that Christianity opened for it what had previously been
a closed door."
If one accepts this assumption of the spirit's incapacity, on its own,
to produce Idealism, and is then compelled to apply it to the ancient
world, then the whole oddity of the undertaking that seeks to call up
Prometheus as the prototype of Idealism's roundabout route becomes
evident. Schelling's recasting of the myth has to be aimed at moving
Prometheus closer to Zeus, in his origin, and at ascribing the allied
action against the Titans to him not only as a premeditated piece of
cleverness but as the consummation of a bond that has to precede
his future history, in order to give it the definite character of a detour.
If Prometheus is supposed to become the patriarch of the principle
of mankind, he must confront mankind as a foreign principle; as the
image of the principle that enters into its reason from outside, he
must at the same time have renounced his origin. Even in the role of
mediator he remains a tragic figure, because he allows the irrecon-
cilability of the indissoluble rights on both sides to persist, and must
fully contest the contradiction "that we are not to suspend, but, on
the contrary, to recognize-for which we have to seek the right
.
expressIon. "
Schelling's Philosophy of Mythology mythicizes Christianity-not its
dogmas, not its fundamental documents, but its sheer existence, after
antiquity-so as to exhibit one myth as the magical preformation of
the total myth that is narrated by Idealism. That is possible only if
history is not a dimension of contingent events, but rather the execution
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Part V
of an immanent teleology that only the vision of the philosophy of

history, sharpened by everything that came later, is capable of per-
ceiving in the myth. The philosophy of history is a speculative retrospect.
Because the world's persisting in existence cannot be taken for
granted, Prometheus is able to become a figuration of the philosophy
of history by identifying his antidivinity, his contradiction, with the
world's persistence. If the Promethean principle of "god against god"
did not exist, "this world" would not yet or no longer exist, or would
at any rate amount to nothing in the face of the irresistibility of the
divine. So Prometheus, in an unsurpassably intensified function, no
longer stands merely for mankind, but for the universe, and against
its innermost nothingness. It is world time itself, as the universe's
interval of grace, for the continuance of which he dismisses any thought
of submission. He "wants to fight through the millenniums-long time,
the time that will not cease except with the end of the present age
of the world, when even the Titans, who were expelled in the earliest
times, will be freed from Tartarus again."
The world-preserving equilibrium of the enmity of the gods, the
contradiction that is antidivinity, can only be endured, it cannot be
dissolved. A solution can only come from outside, through a new
world generation that is no longer marked by contradiction. Only
when "a new race of sons of the gods comes into existence, who will
mediate between gods and men because they were begotten by Zeus
with mortal mothers," can one of these liberate Prometheus. The real
combination of divinity and humanity in Hercules stands beyond the
contradiction, but by the same token it is already eschatological, no
longer historical. Until then, Prometheus, "in his sufferings, is only
the lofty prototype of the human ego, which, precipitated out of its
quiet communion with God, suffers the same fate, being chained with
clamps of iron necessity to the rigid rocks of an _accidental but ines-
capable reality, and hopelessly regards the breach-irreparable and,
at least directly, unneutralizable-that arose as a result of the deed
that preceded the present existence and consequently can never be
retracted or revoked."
Here, it is not a story that is told, but rather the story of history
[die Geschichte der Geschichte1. The liberation of Prometheus cannot remain
an external act of force, which Zeus, as it were, merely allows to
happen. It becomes something he can agree to, because he recognizes
in it something of which he was capable, which is revealed to him by
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Chapter 1
his being contradicted. Schelling evidently does not identify the mankind
that was bequeathed to Zeus by the Titans' era, and which he considered
unworthy to exist, with Prometheus's creatures; otherwise Zeus, in
Schelling's account, could not in the end recognize precisely Prome-
theus's creatures as the new species that he himself had had in mind.
This invention on the part of the philosopher allows him to say that
there was, after ali, in the end "something in Zeus that prevented
him from simply not wanting what Prometheus did." As Schelling
reads it, the Prometheus story is the key to the myth of Zeus: The
continued existence of the other's creatures on the strength of his
own principle produces a new level of susceptibility, in him, to these
same creatures. Hence the inevitability of the begetting of god-men
[Gottmenschen] like Hercules, who transform the state of contradiction
and hostility between Olympus and the Caucasus into a final con-
substantiality. If Prometheus was the figuration of antidivinity, Hercules
is that of God's incarnation [Gottmenschlichkeit].
If the myth is the a priori story of history, it cannot be a mere
product of imagination, or even of millenniums-long selection. The
Romantic revival of the 'original revelation,' this highly visible reversal
of the schema of progress, becomes inevitable. While its content is
not something that had withdrawn, once and for all, from any ex-
perience, it clearly is something that could not always be experienceable,
because it only constitutes philosophy's late experience of history (and
especially of its own history). The Titan would be the prefiguration
of something that, according to every current assessment, is not ac-
cessible even to simultaneous description but only to the most retro-
spective: "Prometheus is the thought in which the human race, after
it had produced from inside itself the whole world of the gods, turned
back to itself and became conscious of itself and its own destiny (the
thought in which it perceived the unfortunate side of belief in the
gods). "
This thought of incipient consciousness has, for Schelling, a mys-
terious origin, between invention and inspiration (as Romanticisrn per-
mitted itself to conceive - or to make inconceivable - the origin of
products of anonymous processes): "Prometheus is not an idea that
any man invented; he is one of the original ideas [Urgedankenl that
force thernselves into existence and that unfold logically \\Then, as
Prometheus did in Aeschylus, they find an abode in a thoughtful spirit
in which to do so." One only needs to understand \\That assertion is
584
Part V
supposed to be avoided: Schelling ascribes an unconscious genesis not

only to the world of the gods, for the Greeks, but also, and again, to
"nature," for his contemporaries, the "Idealists. "16
The Prometheus myth, treated in this way, is no longer an element
in the class of myths, but rather the one myth of the end of all myths.
The fact that the story of history can be read off from this prefiguration
accords with the negation of cyclical-but also of linear-conceptions
of history by a metaphysically grounded pattern of history as a whole,
a pattern that made up the tempting attractiveness not only of the
Idealist philosophy of history but also of all of its competitors, including
those that overthrew it. The act of philosophizing about history has
itself become part of the making of history.
Following this model, a piece of myth becomes the reflection of all
myths, however much the inner logic of mythical repeatability may
be opposed to this. The discovery of that "original idea," in the course
of the reception of the myth, must inevitably be the last act of everything
that the myth can in this way for the first time be read as having
spoken o(
The twenty-five-year-old Goethe identifies with Prometheus as the
aesthetic demiurge and rebel against the Olympian father; in the last
book of Dichtung und Wahrheit that he lived to publish, the fifteenth,
he calls Prometheus, along with myth's other figures of suffering,
Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus, "my saints." The twenty-five-year-old
Marx looks upon Prometheus, in the last sentence of the preface to
his dissertation, as the "most eminent saint and martyr" in an imaginary
"philosophical calendar. "i If there is, again, a gesture of rebellion in
this, then the father of gods against whom a philosophical dissertation
could most readily help one to become a martyr would have been
Hegel, who had been dead for a decade. But the uprising is still more
comprehensive. It is philosophy itself that, in one of the hypostases
that the author accomplishes effortlessly, makes Prometheus's rebellion
its own rebellion, its confession and its motto "against all heavenly
and earthly gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness
as the highest divinity."
The Prometheus conclusion seems willfully to slip out of the pedantic
style of the introduction to an academic treatise, to the "primitive
purpose" of which, as a dissertation, the author himself attests. One
reason at least why the still late-bourgeoisi reader does not see the
transition to the Aeschylus quotation and the canonization of Pro-
585
Chapter 1
metheus clearly before him is that an evidently important appendix

to the dissertation has been lost. In it, Plutarch's polemic against Epi-
curus's theology was supposed to be examined, no doubt as a model
of "the relation of the theologizing intellect to philosophy," and thus
for any situation in which philosophy is ever brought "before the
forum of religion." The priest of Delphi was supposed to stand as the
prototype of a \vhole historical genus. If this could have replaced the
"primitive purpose" of the dissertation by a higher one, then that was
hardly possible vis-a.-vis the faculty in jena, from which the doctoral
candidate wanted to get his degree by means of the actio per distans
[action at a distance] of sending it his treatise and the fees. When
Marx quotes from Aeschylus precisely the words in which Prometheus
says to the intermediary, Hermes, in refusal, that he would rather be
a slave on the rock than be such a loyal emissary of father Zeus as
he is, this gives no hint of the hidden role that the opposition between
Plutarch and Epicurus may have played for him; above all, it certainly
does not give "some grounds for the conjecture ... that Marx may
have unconsciously identified Plutarch with his father. "17 Such spec-
ulations would not be worth mentioning here, since presenting the
author who is especially attacked in the lost portion of a youthful
dissertation as having been secretly an imago of the author's author
can hardly be described as original any longer, but it does serve the
further penetration of the analysis if one can make manifest, in the
frequent appearance of liver attacks (among many later symptoms of
the onetime doctoral candidate), his identification with the mythical
sufferer on the Caucasus, on whose liver Zeus's eagle fed daily.
To the extent that one has not yet entirely succumbed to unser-
iousness, one is at least stimulated to inquire as to how Marx sub-
sequently related himself to Prometheus. The relationship has, I think,
something to do with the "philosophical calendar" that is mentioned
in the last sentence of the preface to the dissertation, or, to put it
differently, with philosophical chronology. This metaphor needs some
elucidation.
We lack not only the appendix to the dissertation with its discussion
of Plutarch's polemic against Epicurus but also the larger treatise that
is announced in the preface, on "the cycle of the Epicurean, Stoic and
Skeptic philosophy in their relation to the whole of Greek speculation."
What type of "relation" this would have been \vhen it \vas exhibited
can only be guessed; much is prornised when the thesis is supposed
586
Part V
to be that the Hellenistic systems referred to are no less than "the

key to the true history of Greek philosophy." Anyone to whom that
does not seem odd or inflammatory should consider its methodological
implication that nothing could be settled definitively regarding the
dominant authors of ancient philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, without
making use of the key provided by the supposed epigones, in what
has always been regarded as a period of decline. An author who
announced his next, larger work with this promise in 1841 himself
wrote this from the situation of an epigone. He was burdened by
arriving-unavoidably-too late: by arriving after the definitiveness
of Hegel. With the philosophical comrades of a foreign age, who were
hardly still able to venture the great gesture of discovering truth, after
the classical unsurpassability of the antipodes (as they were seen) of
Plato and Aristotle - with these comrades, Marx defended himself and
the horizon of possibilities of his time.
This is the point of connection to Prometheus, and the provocation
of a Promethean gesture: The world has already been mastered by
another, time has been fulfilled, history has been concluded - and the
Titan nevertheless wants to make his creatures and let them live. For
Marx, as he takes his degree, Prometheus can also, and especially, be
a saint and a martyr in the philosophical calendar because he had
been a demiurge come too late who did not allow the nature that
was already complete to dispute his right to his work; it was the same
with one who was still making a start in philosophy after Hegel, one
who rejects the denial "that men can live at all after a total philosophy. "k
What could be gathered from the paradigm of postclassical Greek
philosophy was a revolt against the historical state of rest that is
implied in every assignment of 'classical' status, but also, and above
all, the recovery of a historical perspective on something that was
supposedly final. Epicurus had not only remained possible after Plato
and Aristotle, but Plato and Aristotle had for the first time been
'realized' through him, as his idle and carefree gods were the 'form
of life' of the "unmoved mover," which presented itself as the epitome
of life's immunity to concern.
That Prometheus was not only the one who avowed hatred for the
gods, in the tragedy- the Prometheus whom Marx quoted in the
preface - we know, above all, from his preparatory work for the dis-
sertation. There one can see the merging of the mythical image not
only with the figure of Epicurus but also, beyond that, with the figure
587
Chapter 1.
of every late philosophy, insofar as it suffers the odium of coming too

late. Here we need not go into the way in which Marx reduces to a
Hegelianizing schema the philosophical movement from Anaxagoras,
through the Sophists, to Socrates, and again from Socrates, through
Plato, to Aristotle. But it is worth noticing how, at "nodal points" (as
Marx describes them), philosophy is theatrically personified. Thus, in
this history there are moments "when philosophy turns its eyes to
the external world, and no longer apprehends it, but, as a practical
person, weaves, as it were, intrigues with the world, emerges from
the transparent kingdom of Amenthes and throws itself on the breast
of the worldly Siren. "18 Marx all too readily combines such personi-
fications with metaphors of masking and disguise, by which nothing
is more naturally suggested than exposure and unmasking. Hellenism,
too, becomes the "carnival [Faslnachlszeil] of philosophy," and it is then
"essential" for philosophy "to wear character masks." Thus the Cynics,
Alexandrians, and Epicureans are presented in dress that is specific
to their schools. In this context, Prometheus makes his entrance.
He stands as an image of this kind of involvement of philosophy
with the world, in which one of its fundamental ideas posits itself as
a totality, that is, enters into competition with the world. The mythical
doubles [Doppelganger1, Deucalion and Prometheus, constitute a com-
plicated context: Philosophy resembles the production of men by the
throwing of stones backward insofar as it casts "its regard behind it
when its heart is set on creating a world." But, then, it is Prometheus
who, "having stolen fire from heaven, begins to build houses and to
settle upon the earth"; like him, now, "philosophy, expanded to be
the whole world, turns against the world of appearance." This is
followed, without interruption and in lapidary fashion, with an un-
expected leap from ancient into modem Hellenism, in the tiny sentence:
"So jetzt die Hegelsche" [The same now with the philosophy of Hegel].
Only when philosophy, in this manner, has "sealed itself off to form
a consummate, total world" does it fulfill the condition for it to "tum
into a practical relation toward reality." One who cannot read this
from the process of ancient philosophy, as its "historical necessity,"
cannot avoid the logical consequence of denying that it is possible to
live at all after a total philosophy. Since men, and philosophizing ones
at that, evidently continue to live, then there must be an escape from
totality, a post-hisloire of the completed world philosophy. What still
has to be proven for the present could have been dernonstra ted in
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Part V
the form of Epicurus's Hellenistic philosophy. Not to be merely, and

no longer to be, an epigone is the effort that is called for and that
requires one to function on a Titanic scale. Without naming the name
again, but certainly connecting directly with Zeus's, Marx apostrophizes
Prometheus: "But titanic are the times which follow in the wake of a
philosophy total in itself and of its subjective developmental forms,
for gigantic is the discord that forms their unity. Thus Rome followed
the Stoic, Skeptic and Epicurean philosophy."
The hypostasis of philosophy as a historically acting person reaches
its climax with the construction of a typical curriculum vitae, which
knows monuments of its birth and also carries those of its late and
final phases, just as "from the death of a hero one can infer his life's
history." The possibility of a turnabout is like a compensation for the
late arrival of one who will never have the opportunity to construct
a classic totality. When the author understands Epicurus, not as the
result of the philosophy that went before him, but as the possible
turning point of its "transsubstantiation into flesh and blood,"1 he
grasps the Titanic opportunity that remains for a latecomer in a world
that is already occupied and allocated.
Thus, deep in the preliminary work, the canonization of Prometheus
that takes place at the end of the preface to the dissertation is an-
nounced. For this is undoubtedly the latest piece in the sequence of
the texts that have survived. When, in the process, the upshot of the
train of thought enters the narrow context of a passage that is colored
throughout by criticism of religion, Epicurus's protest against the gods
only blends, after all, with the defiance of the fettered Prometheus in
the tragedy, producing what Marx calls "Prometheus's confession"m
and quotes only in Greek: "In simple words, I hate the pack of gods."
If this is supposed to be philosophy's own delayed confession, then it
is an expression of its jealousy directed at the possibility that other-
heavenly or earthly-gods might "not acknowledge human self-con-
sciousness as the highest divinity." The closing formulation of this
jealousy, in Old Testament language, is: "It will have none other beside
it." Thus speaks not the Prometheus of myth, whose defiance, after
all, is only ~gainst the fact that another does not want to let him be
beside him, but rather the enemy of gods who, motivated by godliness,
has left the separation of powers behind, presses toward dogmatic
absolutism, and imposes a claim to uniqueness on philosophy.
When this Prometheus rejects the messenger of the Olympian god
with the words from the tragedy, he is not only meant, in this passage,
to contradict those who rejoice "over the apparently worsened civil
position of philosophy," but also to testify to the self-consciousness
that goes with his inherited knowledge, from his mother, that history
has not come to rest with Zeus's power, that instead there is a doom
hanging over this despot's future: the threat posed by the next gen-
eration, in the form of a son he has not yet been warned not to beget.
The dictum that provides the denouement of the tragedy - "He will
not rule the gods for long" - has become the comforting word, from
the philosophy of history, for those who are tired of totality. As a
figure of history as a whole who combines the past struggle for power
against the Titans with the threat posed to that same power by its
own wantonness, Prometheus stands for what was still hidden from
philosophy, in the future, but was soon to be disclosed-by the author
of the dissertation.
In Hegel's Berlin lectures on the philosophy of religion, which were
a substantial factor in the potency of his influence, the name of the
Titan who would be called on a decade after Hegel's death to ensure
that human life, as philosophy, could again become possible is a weakly
illuminated allegory: an "important, interesting figure," a "natural
power," a "benefactor of men," who taught them the first arts and
brought them fire from heaven. To ignite fire, "a certain cultivation"
was already necessary, so it was not the earliest early morning, not
the precondition of all human culture; instead, at that point, "man
had already emerged from his initial brutality." Prometheus is clearly
moved away from the act of creation and admitted into history as
one of its notable episodes, not as the act of its original foundation.
The myth is leveled off and stands in a panoramalike complex with
other things that need to be appreciated by being brought to mind,
and that are held in readiness for that by mythology: "Thus the first
beginnings of culture have been stored up, in grateful remembrance,
in myths. "19
As soon as Prometheus is no longer the conveyor of the elementary
requirements of the naked prolongation of life, but instead has already
begun to serve 'debrutalization,' he moves within the reach of con-
demnation by every type of Rousseauism. If his fire from the heavens
already stands for the first refinement of nourishlnent, for the illu-
mination of caves, for the working of metals, then it stands in the
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Part V
context of the irresistible increase of needs. Because, since Rousseau,

the suspicion had been refined still further that once the bounds of
minimal self-preservation were passed, all that was produced was the
weakness whose protection engenders new weaknesses, for which fur-
ther helpers and benefactors continually offer their services. Prometheus
could not bring fire into the caves without producing, together with
dependence on the new element, dependence on experts in continually
producing it and on custodians who take care of it, as well.
At any rate, this is the case if Marx's premises are correct in his
description-in the Paris Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844-
of the function of redundant needs in the origin and operation of
property: "Every person speculates on creating a new need in another,
so as to drive him to a fresh sacrifice, to place him in a new dependence
and to seduce him into a new mode of gratification and therefore
economic ruin. Each tries to establish over the other an alien power,
so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. "20 If Rousseau
had still interpreted the process of civilization in accordance with the
schema, already present in ancient thought, of 'enervation' and of the
needs for protection and care that increase exponentially as a result,
here the malice is insinuated that one person's need is the point at
which another person can exercise power over him. That is not read
off from the hypothesis of the early acquisition of fire, but it contains
a pot.ential for anthropological generalization that can easily be pro-
jected into the imagined situation of the archaic cave and hut, after
the freedom from need of the Rousseau stage had been left behind:
"The increase in the quantity of objects is accompanied by an extension
of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every
new product represents a new possibility of mutual swindling and
mutual plundering." Prometheus's character as a friend of men has
become problematic.
From a great historical distance, from the perspective of the end
of history, he looks more like a malicious demon who had thrown a
gift among men on which they had not only-like the satyrs of whom
Rousseau reminds us - burned their beards but for the first time be-
come subject to the alien coercion of things and entangled in the net
of property. With the establishment of fire a chain reaction starts that
makes each person into the potential potentate of every other, because
needs and the means by which to satisfy them are tom apart. Looking
back from the age of machines, it becomes clear that with the first
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Chapter 1
force of production, the process of the assimilation of the subject to

the objects had begun: "The machine accommodates itself to the
weakness of the human being in order to make the weak human being
into a machine." If one had to specify an original need that generates
no dependency between men, then one would have to think of air to
breathe, rather than of fire. Consequently, air is also the most extreme
and inalienable need, which appears, in the description of the process
of increasing misery, as the criterion of return to the cave: "Even the
need for fresh air ceases for the worker. Man returns to a cave dwelling,
which is now, however, contaminated with the pestilential breath of
civiliation.... " Here, now, where the primeval cave appears as per-
verted by the immanent logic of the theft of fire, Prometheus's name
emerges again - in the manner described by Hegel, though not "in
grateful remembrance" - as the name of a distant and radiant memory:
"A dwelling in the light, which Prometheus in Aeschylus designated
as one of the greatest boons, by means of which he made the savage
into a human being, ceases to exist for the worker."
The rhetorical device symmetrically relates the humanization that
is accomplished by the illumination of the cave to the dehumanization
at the end of the history of property: as the unbearableness of the
archaic refuge of the cave. He avoids speaking of the role of fire in
the process of alienation, and leaves Prometheus unimpugned as the
bringer of a light that has merely ceased, since then, to give light to
everyone. Prometheus remains a figure of the philosophy of history,
a guidepost of mankind even during its loss of its essence and through
its losses of identity. The fact that one can allude to him is itself still
the minimum of an identity, a Romantic flaring up in a distant past,
which cannot be related to any figure of the century to which this
reminder is presented.
Finally, at the climax of Das Kapital, in connection with nothing less
than the "absolute general law of capitalist accumulation," in chapter
23,11 we meet the figure of Prometheus again, in the most incidental
and for that very reason most momentous passing glance: Prometheus
has finally become the prefiguration of the proletariat, chained by a
law of nature to the naked rock of capitalist production. Marx did not
invent this identification. He mentions as early as 1846, in the Zirkular
gegen Kriege [Circular against Kriegel, that Kriege has applied the
mythological image of the bound Prometheus to the proletariat. He
himself had been represented, on a handbill against the prohibition
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Part V
ot the Rheinische Zeitung that was printed in Dusseldorf (and exhibited

again in Berlin in 1972), as a bound Prometheus:o The persecuted chief
editor, chained to the Caucasus of a printing press, and the Prussian
eagle, which hacks at his liver on what is, anatomically, the wrong
side (perhaps the heart was intended), and over all, floating in a cloudy
sky, a squirrel instead of Zeus (Eichhorn [Squirrel] being the name of
the Prussian minister of culture and press censor); and beneath this
dominant configuration, prostrate on the ground and raising themselves
from it only with difficulty, the usual naked female figurines: Pro-
metheus's creatures, which in this case are the subscribers-enlightened
by Prometheus's light-of the prohibited newspaper, now demon-
strating, in an attitude of lamentation, against their deprivation of
enlightenment. What the chief editor could not have known then was
that at almost the same time a pupil in Berlin had elevated someone
else to the role of Prometheus, and had celebrated him, in a poem
(which remained fragmentary) entitled "Sanct Helena," as the saint
and martyr of the epoch: Friedrich Engels, celebrating the Corsican
with the "greatest craggy heart" [FaLsenherzen], with which he could
rhyme both "Prometheus's sufferings" [Schmerzen] and the "burnt-out
candles" [Kerzen],
Die Gott, als er die Welt gesetzt zusammen,
Entbrannt, urn Licht zu seinem Werk zu £lammen. 21
[. .. which God, when he put the world together, lit in order to cast
light on his work.]
Seen from the point of view of "capitalist accumulation," Prometheus
on the Caucasus is no longer the victim of the tyrannical despotism
of the father of the gods, but rather of the inexorability of that "absolute
general law," which forces oppressors and oppressed together into a
single historical action-though, to be sure, this is only a result of the
cunning [Hinterlist] of the reason in this history, as a means of driving
them to the point where their destinies inevitably diverge.
The new law does have the stringency of a law of nature, but it
has the character of a law of history. For its point of departure is
precisely its denial that the relation between the quantity of population
and the quantity of nourishment, as Malthus thought it was regulated,
is a law of nature. The development of the quantity of population
now becomes dependent on the absolute variable of the accumulation
of capital. It had been one of the triumphs of the scientific form in
593
Chapter 1
modem thought when Malthus had brought one of the supposedly

purely historical magnitudes under a mathematically formulatable
natural law. Now, with Marx, the dignity of being the determining
factor shifts to the side of history, by virtue of its economic motor.
There is never anything but a relative overpopulation, dependent on
capital's immanent need to keep a reservoir of labor power as a means
of regulating the price of labor. That is the way man is chained to a
faceless, gray substance, which calls up the image of Prometheus bound
to the rock of the Caucasus.
The discussion does not pass entirely without a glance at the father
of the gods, who, in the Prometheus image of the preface to the
dissertation, had been rejected by the Epicurean critique of religion.
Only, the critique of religion now becomes a by-product of the de-
miurgic self-subjection that man was supposed to have brought himself
to in the history of his needs. The god is not the root of the power
that is exercised; man succumbs to the fiction of his gods in accordance
with the same lawfulness with which he submits to the idol that is his
product: "As, in religion, man is governed by the products of his own
brain, so in capitalistic production he is governed by the products of
his own hand. "22 From this one will be justified in inferring that Pro-
metheus had to be named here also because he was no longer punished
(by being chained to the crag) merely on account of his 'critique-of-
religion' conflict with Zeus, but the' economic' consequence of his own
action in making men also chained him to the massif of their needs,
independently of any wrathful superior god.
If it is correct that the "reproduction of labor-power" is nothing
but an "essential element of the reproduction of capital itself," then
the metaphor of the chain leads to the connection between [on the
one hand] the law of the shared causality of the available labor power
and the expansive power of capital, and [on the other hand] the mythical
configuration of the Prometheus story. It points to the Olympian black-
smith-god's wedges, with which Prometheus had been fastened to the
crag. If the price of labor rises as a consequence of the accumulation
of capital, this only means, given the way things fit together in Marx's
theory, that "the length and weight of the golden chain that the wage-
worker has already forged for himself allow of a relaxation of the
tension of it. "23 It is then the communicating combination of the two
magnitudes, capital and population, that brings to mind the comparison
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Part V
that this law "rivets the laborer more firmly to capital than the wedges
of Vulcan did Prometheus to the rock. "24
Translator's Notes
a. See the text related to note 14 in part 3, chapter 3.
b. Countess Reventlow had a literary salon in Schwabing, the artist and intellectual quarter
of Munich, in the period between the tum of the century and World War I.
c. Entwandt is an idiosyncratic fonn that could be taken as the past participle of either entwinden
(which would normally be entwunden) or entwenden (entwendet).
d. The two editions of Kant's Critique if Pure Reason were published in 1781 and 1787.
e. The seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century "querelle des anciens et des modernes"
[quarrel of the ancients and the modems] over whether modem literature (etc.) could equal
or surpass the canonical achievements of the ancients.
f. Karl Moor is the hero of Schiller's famous play Die Rauber (I 78 1). Club-moss, or lycopodium
powder, a highly flammable powder made from the spores of the plant, was used for lightning
flashes in the theater and in fireworks.
g. The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in Kant's Critique if Pure Reason, attempts
to demonstrate the necessity of certain concepts for the unity of a consciousness that knows
the world through perception and thought. Idealists like Fichte deduced, from this logical
priority of the "subject," its priority in reality as well, as the "source" of those necessary
conditions. This concept then lent itself to Romantic aestheticization as the idea of a subject
that "creates" reality.
h. Corinthians 1: 7.
i. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975- ),
vol. 1, p. 31. The quotations in this and the next three paragraphs are all from pp. 30-31.
j. Spiitburgerlich, a term used by German neo-Marxists to describe contemporary capitalist

society.
k. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 1, p. 491.
I. Ibid., pp. 491-493.
m. Ibid., pp. 30-31.
n. Capital: A Critique if Political Economy, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (London, 1887; New
York: International Publishers, 1967), chap. 25.
o. The handbill is reproduced opposite p. 374 of the volume cited in note i.

2
On. the Rock of Mute Solitude
Again
But it would be unfortunate if Swabian poetry should set the fashion ....
Where is Prometheus?
-Karl Gutzkow, Beitrage zur Geschichte der neuesten Literatur (I 836)
If the Enlightenment saw its historical role of procuring light for man-
kind against the nature and the will of its old gods prefigured in
Prometheus's theft of fire, then the Enlightenment's miscalTiage, up
to and including its retrogression, also had to be capable of being
expressed in the language of the Prometheus myth. The bringer of
light winds up in an ambiguous light.
Heine did not succeed, as Goethe did, in delegating his self-
conception as Prometheus to someone else after it miscarried. He too
looked toward Napoleon on the rocky island in the Atlantic and saw,
in him, Prometheus bound; but that did not serve to protect him frorn
suffering Prometheus's fate himself. Napoleon, the inheritor of the
Revolution, becomes the key figure of the failing Enlightenment, and,
as Heine begins to date his doubts, with the eighteenth Brumaire the
bringer of light ceases to satisfy his century.
Although Napoleon had marched into Dusseldorf on a November
day in 1811, in Heine's recollection in 1827 the scene is transformed
into a shining summer day. The emperor's appearance in the avenue
of the palace gardens is described in the blasphemously secularized
language of the Epiphany. The vision is instantaneously conclusive:
" ... \vritten on this face one could read: 'Thou shalt have no other
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Part V
gods beside me.' " Now, at the moment of his recollection, the emperor
is dead, and the poet sees his rocky island in the ocean as "the sacred
tomb, to which the peoples of the Orient and the Occident make
pilgrimage in gaily beflagged ships, and strengthen their hearts by
great recollections of the deeds of the worldly savior who suffered
under Hudson Lowe, as it is written in the evangelists Las Cases,
O'Meara, and Antommarchi." 1
And here there is also the first fleeting self-comparison, the entry
into a reference triangle with ,Napoleon and Prometheus, which was
written down in 1826 on the island of N orderney: "But now the island
is so bleak that I seem to myself like Napoleon on Saint Helena."2
Then his enthusiasm for Napoleon is restricted, no doubt under
Varnhagen's skeptical influence, to the period before the coup d'etat.
The difficulty that everyone encounters when they have to do with
gods is to reconcile the uniqueness of such a nature - "Every inch a
god!"-with the rapid decay of its divinity. But how could the man
in the Dusseldorf palace gardens in 1811 still be a visible god when
he had ceased, in 1799, to carry out the god's work, the Enlightenment
office of bringing light? Already in 1830, in the fourth part of the
Reisebilder [Travel pictures], what is remembered is darkened by what
had been impending at the time: "This picture never disappears from
my memory, I still see him high on his charger, with his eternal eyes
in his marble emperor's face, looking down with the calmness of fate
on the guards who were marching past - he was sending them, then,
to Russia, and the old Grenadiers looked up at him, so awesomely
loyal, so gravely knowing, so death-proud .... "3 Two years earlier, in
the Reise von Munchen nach Genua Uourney from l'v1unich to Genoa],
Heine had still extracted himself from the affair thus: "I pray you,
dear reader, do not take me for an unconditional Bonapartist; my
homage is not to the man's deeds, but only to his genius. I love him
unconditionally only up until the eighteenth Brumaire-then he be-
trayed freedom."4 The deed, Heine says, is always only the clothing
of the human spirit, so that history, too, is nothing but its "old ward-
robe." Everyone who had been present during this piece of history
had been drawn into intoxication along with the one who was intox-
icated by the cup of fame and who was "not able to become sober
until Saint Helena."
Doubts about the reality of the experience and mythicization of the
image are interwoven, form two sides of one and the same process.
"Sometimes a secret doubt creeps over me as to whether I really saw
him myself, whether \ve were really contemporaries, and then it is
as though his image, torn loose from the little frame of the present,
recedes, ever more proudly and imperiously, into the twilight of the
past."5 Time, we are told, is incapable of destroying such an image;
it will envelop it in the mist of legend, "and his amazing story will
finally become a myth." M ythicization does not make historical facts
and identities disappear so much as it makes them become one, and
be consumed, in the typical and the figural. In that case Prometheus
is no longer the name with which the enormity of the one who ended
on Saint Helena can be named and apprehended (since it cannot be
comprehended). From the perspective of a distant future, which only
seems to put into effect what already happens to the poet at close
range, in his memory, Napoleon and Prometheus become indistin-
guishable. Only pedantry can still raise a question about this and
answer it with a thesis: "Perhaps, thousands of years in the future, a
hairsplitting schoolmaster will prove irrefutably, in a deeply learned
dissertation, that Napoleon Bonaparte was completely identical with
that other Titan who stole light from the gods and for this crime was
chained to a solitary rock, in the middle of the sea, exposed to a
vulture that daily lacerated his heart."6
This is the irony of a perspectival illusion, which cannot yet be
imputed to the present and the near future, to its memory or its
investigation of history. But here, where he is still the great sufferer,
he ceases to be Prometheus the bringer of light, "who succeeded in
throwing the first illuminating torch into the darkness of the Middle
Ages and of the demons of religion, and thus in kindling a world
conflagration in which everything congealed and encrusted is refined
into a new humanity."7 No, Heine did not stay with the god on
horseback in the palace gardens, with the unequivocalness of his own
memory. He projects the mythicization into the distance of millenniums.
Enough of what is factual must fil-st have been forgotten so that the
contour of the figural can gain sole validity. Mythicization is not the
affair of a near present. Heine's procedure is one of inversion: After
Napoleon had become Prometheus, Prometheus will finally become
Napoleon. It is as though this had been invented as the opposite of
Goethe's procedure with the myth.
The second inversion of the Prometheus story relates to the regime
of Louis-Philippe. Heine ascribes to the "citizen king's" Ininister, Casilnir
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Part V
Perier, the incredible crime of perverting the theft of light. In the

period of the Restoration this man had been the spokesman of the
opposition, and as such had been a model, Heine says, of conduct
and dignity, with the strictest logic and with rigid a priori arguments.
Suddenly, however, he had misjudged his strength and bowed down
before the mighty ones whom he could have destroyed-had begged
from them the peace that he should only have granted by his own
mercy. Now he is called the "Hercules of the age of the juste milieu
[golden mean]." Heine sees this depravation in the nature of a man
who had had "much fine education as a citizen" as corresponding to
an inversion of the mythical proceeding: " ... an upside-down Pro-
metheus, he steals the light from men in order to give it back to the
gods. "8
Heine still has to wait for the death of the Olympian in Weimar
who had 'occupied' [i.e., established a preeminent claim to] the aesthetic
identification with Prometheus and had led it into the resignation of
self-experience. The brisk and cheerful tone of arrogant defiance was
no longer possible. Heine had already tried, in 1825-1826, in the
"Song of the Oceanides" in the second North Sea cycle in the Buch der
Lieder [Book of songs], to renew the identification. The difference is
tangible as in a picture. In Aeschylus's tragedy, the Oceanides, daugh-
ters of Oceanus and Thetis, had been the chorus, which had to bewail
Prometheus's suffering, but also his defiance of the gods. Now the
poet sits on the seashore, makes fun of the sea birds, and boasts of
his own good fortune, of the distant beloved who dreams of him. He
attempts once more the poet's great illusion, which comes down to
him from Sturm und Drang's heroizing of the genius-from Goethe's
"Prometheus." The chorus of Oceanides destroys the deception, sees
through the epigone's hollow self-assurance. At the bottom of his
boasting they see pain.
Then they remember Prometheus, whom they once had to comfort,
and they exhort the man on the seashore to renewed rationality, to
honor the gods until the other Titan, Atlas,
... die Geduld verliert
Und die schwere Welt von den Schultem abwirft
In die ewige N acht.
[loses his patience and casts the heavy world from his shoulders, into
eternal night.]
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Chapter 2
But he, the man on the seashore, is stubborn, they say, like his ancestor,
... der himmlisches Feuer
Den Gottern stahl und den Menschen gab,
Und geiergequalet, felsengefesselt
Olympauftrotzte ....
[who stole heavenly fire from the gods and gave it to men, and-
vulture-tortured and shackled to a rock-defied Olympus .... ]
Only in the last line of the poem does Heine indicate who had been
addressed by the chorus of Oceanides, when he abandons the third
person and concludes, in the first:
Und ich sass noch lange im Dunkeln und weinte.
[And I sat for a long time after that in the dark and cried.]
The poet is no longer the potter of man, in his workshop, who offers
Zeus conflict. He is one who has been sobered by looking back at the
aesthetic subject's self-exaltation, who is now capable only of bitter
mockery of nature, and cannot assert his image of reality against the
dark threats and exhortations of the Oceanides.
Then Goethe is dead, and his Prometheus seems, in retrospect,
loquacious and, even in his defiance, all too hungry for justification.
Heine returns to Prometheus in 1833-1834, when he obeys the in-
vitation of the leader of the Saint-Simonists in Paris, Prosper Enfantin,
to describe the development of ideas in contemporary Germany for
French readers. Heine describes how philosophy, in the form of Chris-
tian Wolff's metaphysics, was drawn into the controversies of Protestant
theology when the orthodox called on it for assistance against the
Pietists. This appeal by religion for help from philosophy had made
its downfall inevitable, Heine says, for when it defended itself it talked
itself into its ruin. That makes him think of the dumbness of myth
and of its powers: "Religion, like every absolutism, must not justify
itself Prometheus is chained to the rock by silent Force. That's right,
Aeschylus does not let the personification of Force speak a single \vord.
I t mus t be dumb .... "I)
The archaic' unrepeatability of the chaining to the rock lies in its

speechlessness, which is simultaneously the absence of complaint and
the absence of reasons. Myth is, precisely, not a theology, because
the punishing god does not explain hilTIself and because he rejects
every opportunity for a theodicy. Myth turns out to be distance froln
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Part V
the possibility of a covenant, from any dialogical search for language,

as a mark of mere weakness. Prometheus is the witness of the tremendum
[dreadful thing]b that strikes one dumb and is endured dumbly, and
the first triumph over which is already achieved when it breaks into
speech. For Heine, the analogy to politics comes naturally: As a "rea-
soning catechism" is to religion, so t~e moment is to political absolutism
in which it finds itself called upon to publish an "official state newspaper.
For the philosopher, in the latter case as well as in the former, our
triumph is that we have induced our opponent to speak." Myth is not
the preliminary stage of logos, a stage in which one is not yet capable
of it, but is instead the most intolerant exclusion of it. Rhetoric, however
despised it may be and however far removed from the burdens of
proof that go with dialogue, nevertheless does signify an acknowl-
edgment of the expectation that one should present and represent
oneself, that one should present oneself 'physiognomically.'
When Heine's gaze rests unwaveringly on the dumb scene of the
Titan's enchaining-that is, on the 'archaic' essence of the terror of
utter dependency, then this narrow focus is at the same time the
exclusion of every allegorical interpretation associated with a philosophy
of history. As Goethe had sought the static image of the potter of
man, in his workshop, so Heine chooses to look at the suffering Pro-
metheus - again as a scene that has no history. From this perspective,
the unfolded myth that tells stories and has become talkative is already
theodicy in nuce [in essence]. It presses out of the sphere of dumb
force.
Before· I approach the poet's new identification with Prometheus
the sufferer, in the Wintermarchen,c I must direct a glance at the
polemical-satirical employment of it that immediately preceded this,
and that modified the one in the Franzosische Zustande. d The "Kirchenrat
Prometheus" [Reverend Prometheus], which was later included in the
Neue Gedichten, first appeared on June 22, 1844, in Vorwarts! How could
a clergyman have earned the title of a Titan?
In 1843 Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus published, under the title
Die endlich oJJenbar gewordene positive Philosophie der OJfenbarung-der
allgemeinen Prufung dargelegt [The finally revealed positive philosophy
of revelation-exhibited for everyone to examine], an eight-hundred-
page transcript of Schelling's lectures on the "philosophy of revelation,"
with commentary that ranged from critical to polemical in tone. But
to be able to be a Prometheus for Heine it would not have been
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Chapter 2
enough to present Schelling from the standpoint of a Protestant ra-

tionalism. It went almost without saying that from this source no light
could be stolen, even by the cunning trick of a lecture transcript. So
the point of the satirical poem is that "Sir Paul, the noble robber,"
had bargained for "Olympus's maximum anger" in return for merely
stealing "Schelling's notebooks" and, instead of "illuminating man-
kind," procuring for them only the "antithesis of light, palpable dark-
ness." Why should this duped robber fear the fate of Prometheus, as
Heine counsels him to?
The background of this is the fact that Schelling, as Hegel's successor
in Berlin, had become the Prussian state philosopher, who Heine calls
the "court wise man," and to take the field against whom must provoke
the most extreme vengeance of all. The Prussian Staatszeitung [Official
journal] had repeatedly asserted, against Paulus, Schelling's property
right in his lectures. Of course this was not the question at ali, Vamhagen
von Ense writes in his diary on October 9, 1843, but rather "whether
Schelling is a charlatan and liar, a bankrupt philosopher who usurps
other people's ideas and accuses those who point out his borrowings
of having stolen them from him!"lo Naturally, Varnhagen could not
deny himself a visit to the Reverend Paulus, in Heidelberg. He found,
instead of a Prometheus, an "ancient, thin little man with senses that
are still sharp, an inquiring gaze, easy speech." He had laughed about
the prohibition of his book and the philosopher's wrath. He would do
the same thing again any time, "and if he succeeded in acquiring a
reliable transcript of Schelling's philosophy of mythology, he would
not hesitate to have it printed. He believes, furthermore, that Schelling
is a conscious rogue, that he has always impudently lied and
b ragge d .... " I I
Heine did not warn the Heidelberg clergyman against the fate of
Prometheus from the safe position of an onlooker. He saw himself as
close to this fate. So at any rate he dreams of himself on his vVinter-
marchen journey, when he spends the night in the Prussian fortress of
Minden. At first, in this case, the mythical reference scene that he
replayed was that of Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus, with the
boulder rolled before the entrance. Like Odysseus to the Cyclops, the
traveling poet identified himself to the corporal at the city gate as
"No One," and gave as his profession that of an eye doctor \vho
operated on giants for cataracts. After so nluch iIDpudence to\vard
superior power, its figures - the censor and the gendarmes - oppress
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Part V
the dreamer. They drag him out in chains. to the rock wall, at which,
without any name having to be mentioned, he recognizes himself as
Prometheus. For there is the vulture, who, with his talons and his
black feathers, resembles the Prussian eagle and devours the liver
from his body.
Heine's dream is to have become the Prometheus of the Prussian
eagle. Heine is certainly flirting with a role that is too great for him,
but at least no longer with the role of the blasphemous potter of man.
In the end, the trigger for the dream had only been the dirty tassel
on the canopy of his bed in the Minden Inn, as the morning shows:
Ich lag zu Minden im schwitzenden Bett,
Der Adler ward wieder zum Quaste. 12
[I lay in Minden in a sweat -soaked bed and the eagle became a tassel
again.]
Prometheus in a dream-in a nightmare, at that-this connection
had already been preformulated in the H arzreise Uourney in the Harz
Mountains] in 1824, with a different, at that time obligatory, direction
of reference. "In a pitch-dark night I arrived in Osterode. I lacked
the appetite to eat, and went straight to bed. I was dog-tired and slept
like a god. In my dream I was back in Gottingen.... " In his dream,
then, his flight from studying and from his books fails; the dreamer
finds himself in the library of the hall of legal studies, rummaging
through old dissertations. As the clock strikes midnight the Titaness
Themis appears, with a following of jurists, who immediately launch
into pedantic disputations and declanlations. Until the goddess loses
her patience and cries out "in a tone of terrible gigantic grief' that
she hears "the voice of her beloved Prometheus." Evidently the com-
parison of the torrents of the disputing jurists' words to the ocean surf
has awakened an association with Aeschylus's scene with its chorus
of Oceanides, and made it into an image of resignation. All this artificial
justice has to remain helpless in the face of real suffering, since "sneering
Power and silent Force chain the innocent one to his rock of torture,
and all your babble and wrangling cannot relieve his wounds and
break his chains!"13 Here the dream becomes an eschatological scene
for detested jurisprudence. The goddess breaks into tears and the
whole gathering howls along with her, as though seized by the fear
of death; the ceiling of the hall cracks, the books plunge from the
shelves-an end of the world, in the halL The dreamer flees into
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Chapter 2
another room, into the collection of antique works of art, to the images
of Apollo and Venus. It is the libretto, in a dream, of the transformation
of the law student into a poet.
When, however, in the second French edition of the Harzreise, in
1858, even the Prometheus of this dream is already related to
Napoleon-when (by a tiny extension) the German "Marterfelsen"
["rock of torture"] is turned into a "rocher dans l' ocean" ["rock in the
ocean"], which would have an unmistakable meaning for any French
reader- this is a favor-courting falsification of the original connection
of ideas, in which the disproportion between pedantic jurisprudence
and the superior force of the injustice that the Titan has to suffer had
made up the pattern.
So Prometheus's dream position in the Wintermiirchen had been
made ready for two decades. In the intervening period, the poet
himself, in an indissoluble mixture of wish fulfillment and nightmare,
had ascended the Titan's rock. As an attitude, this did not escape the
observation or the doubts of his contemporaries. In the Telegraph for
Deutschland, in 1838, Ludwig Wihl wrote about Heine in Paris: "The
deep Weltschmerz that he claims seems to me to be a poetic invention;
I have not perceived much of it in Heine. When Prometheus complains
that a vulture eviscerates his breast, then Heine has coaxed the vulture
to himself so as to be able to complain interestingly .... " What is
disputed in Heine's case is granted to Borne: c "Promethean suffering
b urne d . ..
In Borne ....
"14
But in waking hours, too, and in the most terrible reality, Heine
was not spared identification with Prometheus - when he again had
a god, so as, "in the excess of my suffering, to allow myself a few
blasphemous curses."15,f Now it was no longer the Zeus of the myth,
and was certainly not the "good-natured and amiable god" that Heine
had seen himself as in his youth, "by the grace of Hegel." It \vas the
god of whom he writes, terribly, to Laube: "The hand of this great
torturer of animals lies heavily upon me. "16 Here the idea turns, as
though of its own accord, into the icon of the myth, which, like a not-
understood prophecy that now revealed its meaning, had been so
close to Heine all his life: "I suffer incredibly, I endure truly Prolnethean
agonies, as a result of the vengefulness of the gods, \vho bear Ine ill
will because I gave men a few little night laInps, a few penny candles.
I say 'the gods' because I don't want to say anything about God. I
know his vultures no\v and have grea t respect for them." 17
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Part V
The alternation of language in these sentences is striking. Heine

pictures himself, in an Enlightenment idyll, as a bringer of light: Such
a little enlightenment was enough to cause him to be struck down so
harshly. But he is supposed to be talking about the mythical gods-
only to revert, immediately afterward, to "his vultures," with the
singular pronoun, and thus to make the new God into the old Zeus
after all, by assigning the tormenting emissaries to him alone. In
Minden, it had still been the eagle of the Prussian state; in the final
use of the myth as an image of the shabby humiliation of the sufferer,
close to death, the carrion bird serves the purpose. Impotence in the
face of pain is the counterblow in response to the Enlightenment's
self-empowerment; the suffering of the individual is a martyrdom for
its failure. That is why the myth could be entirely detached, again,
from the poet's identification, and projected onto mankind, which is
punished, in history, on the rock of its planet, for its rebellion: "The
earth is the great rock on which mankind, the true Prometheus, is
fettered and is tom to pieces by the vulture (of doubt)- it stole light
and suffers torment .... " 18
Heine, if one may put it this way, gave himself courage, with flippant
singing, to pass by the old problem of justifying God. Nietzsche tries
to remain standing in front of it, so as not to see it. In his early period
he perceived it and overcame it, as Kant overcame the dialectic g of
pure reason, by means of the concept of appearance: What, as reality,
could not be justified could nevertheless become lightly tolerable as
a beautiful appearance with the "artistic meaning behind all events."
So he himself saw it in retrospect when, in 1886, he wrote the foreword
to the new edition of The Birth if Tragedy. As a total work of art, h the
world could be defended. The ultimate seriousness that had once been
bound up with everything that was supposed to be reality could be
ignored. This was the last form of theodicy before the death of God.
From Descartes's failure to overcome his most abysmal doubt, that
all knowledge could fall victim to a more powerful deceiver, Nietzsche
drew a new conclusion: If the Dieu trompeur [deceiver God] could not
be refuted, he could become the God of an artists' metaphysics. If
the truthfulness of the world ground could have been saved, then art
would have had to remain, and to be definitively, a lie. 19 The failure
of the Cartesian theory of knowledge and of its successors allowed
one to revalue it into an aesthetics of the world that, on account of
its lack of relation to truth, has for the first time become accessible
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Chapter 2
for enjoyment. The attitude of the onlooker makes cheerfulness pos-

sible, even before the scene of tragedy-or especially before it.
Nevertheless, this sort of God, who is not a deceiver any more, but
an unthinking artiste, deserves the Wagnerian fate of the "twilight of
the gods." It turns out that the "death of God," in Nietzsche's pro-
clamation, is precisely an event in a tragedy, which history itself has
become. As early as 1870, in the preliminary work for The Birth if
Tragedy, Nietzsche had written: "I believe in the primeval Germanic
saying: All gods must die. "20 In the sketches for the drama Empedokles,
from the same period, "The great Pan is dead!" stands for what, in
the fifth act, was to become the work of the philosopher. Although
it is constructed on the dynastic principle, Greek myth always has
difficulty making its fallen gods disappear; they are not permitted to
die, because the Greeks could think of nothing better to connect with
the concept of a god than immortality. But the idea of generations
contradicts this attribute. Immortality is not originally at home in
myth; more nearly so would be the restoration of one who has been
dismembered, or of the Phoenix from its ashes. It is quite logical when
a mythicization of history includes the death of the gods who have
ruled history's epochs. In his 'rectification' of the Prometheus story,
Nietzsche will attempt to maintain this against the tradition.
The fact that Prometheus is only able to save himself by employing
the prophecy of a coming, more powerful son of Zeus as a means by
which to blackmail the lover who is already infatuated with Thetis
must have been out of place in Nietzsche's conception. For it is precisely
in the gods' downfall that man's ultimate opportunity lies. Because
he is just as good as he is stupid, he can only become happy when
the gods "have entered their final twilight." This at any rate is the
way the path "to a German paganism," made present in Wagner's
art, is conceived at the end of the seventies. ~l If Prometheus knows
of the downfall of the gods, he must guard this knowledge, so that
Zeus is not warned against begetting one who will conquer him. The
god's fall is the condition of the possibility of man's ascent.
Nietzsche's view of the myth for the first time makes it compelling
that the rivalry between Zeus and Prometheus is not a dynastic affair.
Zeus is fatally provoked because the world can succeed as a total work
of art [Gesamtkunstwerk] only if only one hand is at work in it. Nietzsche's
interest in this myth lacks any Inoralizing tendency; he has before hiln
t.he rivalry of two total artists [GesamtkunstziJerker], two "deceivers" in
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Part V
the sense of that "amoral artist-god" who stages his total conception
of the world. If all his sympathy is with Prometheus, then that is
because Prometheus had already demonstrated, with the deceptive
sacrifice, what tricks of art he was capable of
Nietzsche had in mind what Richard Wagner's eye would fall on
when he had placed on the title page of The Birth if Tragedy the vignette,
done by the sculptor Rau, of the liberated Prometheus who places
one foot on the eagle, which has been struck by Hercules's arrow,
and who still bears on his arms, in their gesture of defiance, the broken
chains. In the preface the author pictures the moment in which the
addressee of the dedication would catch sight of this reference, and
would associate with the author's name the realization that in everything
that he had written in this book he had been conscious of his counterpart
[Wagner] as the embodiment of art as "the highest task and the truly
metaphysical activity of this life."i
The theory of the origin of tragedy is based on a more general
thesis about the essence of culture, according to which the height of
its accomplishrnents presupposes the depth of the underlying stratum
of hostility to man above which it rises. The Prometheus story thus
becomes the myth not so much of how Zeus's hostility to man is
overcome, by the sufferer on the Caucasus, as of how it is neutralized
and counterbalanced. The Greeks, we are told, had never entirely
succeeded in forgetting what the apparent clarity and cheerfulness of
their culture rested on: "Culture [Bildung], which is above all a true
need for art, rests on a frightful foundation: But this foundation makes
itself known in the dawning perception of shame."22 The familiar
Prometheus image adapts itself to this fundamental idea. The cruel-
sounding truth about the nexus between culture and suffering does
not cause any doubt to arise regarding the value of existence; it is
"the vulture that gnaws at the liver of the Promethean furtherer of
cu Iture. "
If one asks what is the concrete content of this image, it turns out
that Prometheus's suffering combines with the deed whose punishment
it is: By bringing fire, he created the preconditions of human work,
and especially of its slavish forms, which subject the mass to service
to the life form of the few. For Nietzsche's fundamental schema is
explicated by the assertion, gathered from the Greek case, that slavery
is part of the essence of a culture. The "misery of men who struggle
to live" must indeed even be intensified, in order "to make possible,
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for the tiny number of Olympian humans, the production of the world
of art." Even though Nietzsche did not take this literary fixation of a
historical fact into a norm over from the sketch into the published
text, nevertheless it makes possible the unique reflection on the Pro-
metheus story that its point cannot be Prometheus's being unchained,
as it is shown in the vignette on the title page. The immanent tendency
of the myth is seen in the fact that it intensifies even further the
suffering of the friend of man as a result of his establishment of culture.
A sketch for the second part of the Tragedy book, which was supposed
to deal with "the means used by the Hellenic will in order to reach
its goal, the genius," speaks of this.
Nietzsche admits that his postulate of what underlies culture contains
the "source of the rage" that communists, socialists, and liberals had
always nursed against the arts, as well as against classical antiquity.
The only means by which they could hope to remove that tension
was the [literally] "iconoclastic abolition of the claims of art." He is
not able, with this theory, to answer the question why, then, the
despising of culture and "glorification of the poverty of the spirit"
could not triumph. He appeals vaguely to "inescapable powers ... that
are a law and a limit to the individual," and which thus protect the
privilege of culture with sanctions. Otherwise it would be "the cry of
compassion that would tear down the walls of culture." Prometheus
may be a name for those ["inescapable"] powers if he symbolizes not
only the disproportion, which is immanent in culture, between its
greatness and its humanity but also the agency that guarantees it: As
long as he remains chained to the rock of the Caucasus, the enclosure
surrounding the sacred precinct cannot be stormed. At the same time,
though, he remains the embodiment of consciousness of that implication
of culture - he prevents us from forgetting how the Greeks kept the
pressure of the necessities of existence, and of dealing with them, at
a distance from themselves. Prometheus is the antitype to the slave
as the "blind mole of culture"2:1: He endures its preconditions knowingly.
Such knowledge about the antihuman foundation of culture is po-
tentially a threat to its permanence. Therefore Nietzsche makes the
state into its guarantor; it is the realized will of those who by being
relieved of slave labor and able to benefit from it are able to produce
and to enjoy art. At the same tilDe, this state is an aggregate ern-
bodiment not only of instances of the exercise of coercion but also of
the production of delusions, which prevent its function from being
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laid bare and are "far more powerful than the rational realization that
one is deceived. "24 One sees that Nietzsche has learned from Plato
what Sophism is, but does not go along with the negative evaluation
of it. He would prefer to be the new Gorgias, the personification of
a good conscience in the will to deceive. This is the original basis of
his hostility toward Socrates, the apostate from Sophism, and toward
Plato, the systematizer of this apostasy. Nietzsche did not see Sophism
as a phenomenon of decline. For him, it is the feat of strength that
had become possible and necessary as a result of the decline of the
polis, that is, as a result of the wearing out of what Plato 'saved' by
transferring it into the transcendence of the Ideas. If Descartes's wicked
demon could not be refuted, then the only thing left to do was to
become this demon oneself- through the "will to power."
What Nietzsche did not accept from antiquity's self-understanding
is the link between knowledge and eudaemonia. He calls it his "confes-
sion of faith" that "every deeper instance of knowledge is terrible."25
Nothing of what presents itself as pleasant can stand up to a thorough
examination as to its veracity; knowledge makes itself perceptible only
by the fact that it gives rise to terror and pain. This finding does not
present a mere contingent, supplementary circumstance of the human
constitution; on the contrary, nature itself, "where it strains to create
what is most beautiful, is something frightful. "26 That is only a different
formulation of the statement that for man, it would be better not to
have been born;j through his ability to create culture, he justifies the
fact that he was, nevertheless, born. Nietzsche describes the situation
with the aid of the thematic framework of the Iliad: All the terrible
expenditure of men's lives in the Trojan War is because of the beauty
of Helen. 27 Beauty is not truth, but it justifies man in avoiding the
terror of truth, so as at least to endure his suffering for something
that makes it worthwhile.
Thus "the Olympian magic mountain opens, as it were, before us,
and shows us its roots." Precisely because, in tragedy, the question
of the reason for being [Seinsgrundfrage] has been answered negatively,
something that is not obvious is needed "in order to be able to live
at all." Nietzsche describes what places itself before the abyss [Abgrund]
of groundlessness [Grundlosigkeit]-namely, the mythical web of the
gods' relations to and against one another-as the "radiant dream-
birth of the Olympians." Here too everything is governed by the idea
that although, in myth, the old is overthrown, it is survived by an
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"overwhelming mistrust of the Titanic powers of nature. "28 Although

Prometheus himself is a Titan, he is not mentioned when Nietzsche
connects this mistrust with names; instead, we hear of "the vulture
of the great friend of mankind," together with the terrible fate of
Oedipus, the curse of the Atridae, and the entire "philosophy of the
sylvan god." There is cheerful serenity only on this side of the terrors.
But how does consciousness make sure of its being "on this side"?
Everything presses toward myth's telling its story as a story of a final
[i.e., unrepeatable] past. But does it not remind us of it as of something
that is still present? What had been dynastic succession and pushing
aside in time-even if in an entirely indefinite time-is [now] arranged
in layers, as a system of suppression and forcible forgetting. The
culture that Nietzsche calls "Apollinian" must "always first overthrow
an empire of Titans and slay monsters."
The Birth of Tragedy is a utopian book. Its subject is not the past but
the future. It deals with the future with the aid of an argument that
Nietzsche did not carry over into the book from his January 1870
lecture on the Greek musical drama, but which he had placed at the
end, there: What was real is possible in the future. This is not yet the
recurrence of the same, but it is one of its anticipatory formulations.
The guarantee of what is still, or again, possible. is itself mythical,
contrary to a linear concept of history as a sequence of singular phe-
nomena, of unrepeatable things that endure only for memory. The
metahistorical freight of the "questionable book" is concentrated in
the sentence of that lecture that says: "What we hope for from the
future, that was already a reality once before .... "29
At the end of his intellectual path, in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche thought
that the title of his early work could have been "Hellenism and Pes-
simism." In that case its "practical application to Wagnerism" would
not have been so much bound up with the suggestion that the latter
was a "symptom of ascent. "30 All of this is rectification: Their tragedies,
we are told, are precisely not proof that the Greeks were pessimists.
Schopenhauer went wrong at this point, as he went wrong everywhere.
But the retraction of apparent implications itself turns out to be apparent
[vordergriindig "foreground," not affecting fundamentals]; by wanting
to see the "hopes attached to the name of Wagner" excised froln the
work and forgotten, Nietzsche raises the justification of the future by
the "past perfect" [Vorvergangenheit] into a dimension that is just as
overlarge as it is undefined. "A tremendous hope speaks out of this
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essa y" - but toward what "Dionysian future of music" can it still be
directed? No other, to be sure, but the unwritten one of the opera,
Zarathustra. One need not hesitate, he says, to put down his name or
the word Zarathusthra where The Birth if Tragedy has Wagner's name:
"The entire picture of the dithyrambic artist is a picture of the pre-
existent poet of Zarathustra. . . . Wagner himself had some notion of
that; he did not recognize himself in this essay. "31
The young Wilamowitz opposed Nietzsche's conception of myth in
a sensational polemic. He denies, he says, a reign of the Titans, having
a determining importance for an entire age, "in which the dark forces
of nature rule, before the appearance of their conquerors, the powers
of nature that are friendly to man. "32 Healthy common sense teaches
this, and so (of course) does the investigation of myth. But whatever
the former and the latter may teach, one can discern the philologian's
desire to reject the idea of an original darkness of ruling powers that
were replaced by a dynasty having more amiable physiognomies only
as progress was made in the diminution of anxiety. He is anxious
about the reputation of those who had invented myth's 'stories' if the
totality of these stories should also betray 'the story' [i.e., the history]
of myth itself
It is not a question of the value to be attached. For Nietzsche, too,
the priority given to the Dionysian was not based on the fact that it
was supposed to be the absolutely 'archaic.' Otherwise nothing could
be gathered from it in regard to the future. But what had to be
abandoned, if one accepted Nietzsche's thesis, was the comfortable
preconception according to which a predisposition toward cheerful
serenity and beautiful greatness had been bound up from the beginning,
and constitutively, with the temper of the Greeks. Instead, such a
character now had to appear as a short epilogue after the protracted
process of bringing light into a gloomy heritage - as an episode, shortly
before the gods' decline into allegory, or their succumbing to philosophy
or even to satIre.
What was at stake here was not of secondary importance for the
philologian. The young Wilamowitz's basic question had to be the
question, From what prior givens had the Greeks taken or created
their gods? Was that a gradual process of the transformation of gro-
tesque animal, demonic, or at any rate inhuman horrors? Should the
Greeks not have been able to do what the Christian God, after them,
and the aesthetic genius, after him, would be able to do-namely, to
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create something out of nothing, or almost nothing? Wilamowitz, at

any rate, credited the Greek spirit with making human-formed and
humanly sensitive gods arise from formless natural powers such as
the Hellenes had brought with them from their ancestral homes. That
would then be an artistic act of putting into an image-without any
transitional phases - what had hitherto been amorphous. Only in this
way had Greek art, too, become the "pure emanation of the Greek
spirit," which created for itself no Indian or Egyptian monsters, no
Semitic fetishes, but "gave the images of superterrestrial beings divinity
only in the form of a humanity that is raised to the level of eternal
beauty-which we too can approach only worshipfully."
The original formlessness of those old powers of nature, with which
the Hellenes were supposed to have had to do in the region where
they originated, enabled them to transport their gods faithfully during
their migration. They behaved like good philologians, and managed
nevertheless, or precisely on the strength of that, to become creative.
So the genealogies of the gods in myth have nothing to do with their
real origin. They are, in the end, a systematically harmonizing com-
pilation by Hesiod. Myth does not tell its own history. It does not
exhibit the toil by which it converted itself from the ritual to the
rhapsodic form and worked its way all the way through to a frivolous
fluency. For Wilamowitz, the gods' becoming human is not a subject
for the history of religion. If it were, then Greek art, in Praxiteles,
would not have been able to carry out the work of giving images,
over against the amorphousness of what in the meantime was only
known by names.
Nietzsche had done nothing less than to call in question the heritage
of German Classicism, in the philology that it had begotten. Wilam-
owitz's whole indignation is directed at this: "Here I saw what mil-
lenniums had unfolded, denied; here the revelations of philosophy
and religion were effaced so that a washed-out pessimism could pull
its bittersweet faces in the desert; here the images of the gods, with
which poetry and the plastic arts had peopled our heaven, were
smashed to pieces so that one could worship the idol, Richard Wagner,
in their dust; here the edifice of a thousandfold assiduity, of shining
genius, was demolished so that a drunken dreamer could take an
unpleasantly deep look into the Dionysian depths; this I did not tol-
erate .... " What is more tolerable for the philologian is if, while the
pure exemplification of those finest talents of the Greeks is found in
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Part V
the Homeric morning, this decays later' on, and much later on, into
lower forms that are unpleasant and uninteresting. What is fascinating
in the Greeks should have been an expression of what they were
originally, not a result of their mastery of themselves and their struggle
to achieve distance. Only what is original can represent what is valid.
Incidentally, academically accredited classical philology was not
unanimously opposed, with Wilamowitz, to Nietzsche's Tragedy book.
Perhaps too little noticed is the fact that a man who had as decisive
an impact on the theory of ancient tragedy as Jacob Bemays had
declared that Nietzsche advocated - albeit in an exaggerated manner-
views that he himself had developed in his treatise on Aristotle's theory
of tragedy. Bernays had published his Grundziige der verlorenen Abhand-
lung des Aristoteles iiber Wirkung der Tragoaie [Main features of Aristotle's
lost treatise on the effect of tragedy] in 1857. Cosima Wagner reports
the remark to Nietzsche in her letter of December 4, 1872; Nietzsche
replies that this is "divinely impudent on the part of this cultivated
and clever Jew," but at the same time "an amusing indication that
the shrewd ones among us already have some idea of what's up, after
all."33 Even later, Nietzsche did not dispute the correctness of Bernays's
thesis about Aristotle, though he certainly denied the correctness of
Aristotle's theory itself: "Not in order to get rid of terror and pity,
not in order to purge oneself of a dangerous affect by its vehement
discharge-Aristotle misunderstood it that way-but in order to be
oneself the eternal joy of becoming, beyond all terror and pity-that
joy which includes even joy in destroying. "34
This side glance at one of the great polemics of the century makes
clearer what Prometheus's solitude-not only among gods but between
worlds of gods - had meant for Nietzsche. Prometheus preserves the
affinity between Titans and men into the epoch of the Olympians,
with their indifference to man, who had already been there when
they arrived and whose right to exist had become doubtful as a result
of the dynastic change. In the way Nietzsche wants to see the Titan,
his partiality for man is barbaric, and his easing of their life situation,
by establishing culture, is not unambiguously a favor, because it does
not unambiguously enhance their power. Nietzsche lays on the Titan
even more, in relation to men, than the myth that is handed down:
"Because of his Titanic love for man, Prometheus must be tom to
pieces by vultures .... "35 The way he alludes, linguistically, to the one
who was tom in pieces-the boy, Dionysus, who was dismembered
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by Titans-betrays, by its exaggeration, the mythologist's disappoint-

ment at the way past terrors become pale. In any case, Nietzsche is
not satisfied with the way the Titanic figure belongs, in Aeschylus's
play, to a former age. This is not altered by the fact that in any case,
for him, the Dionysian and the Apollinian do not stand in a unique
and unambiguous relationship in which one succeeds the other, but
rather, "in new births ever following and mutually augmenting one
another, [they] controlled the Hellenic genius."
Of course Aeschylus comes closest to what Nietzsche takes to be
the original schema of tragedy: The chorus was supposed to accompany
the god's appearance, both physically and musically, and just as it
had first commented on the vision of the suffering and revived Dionysus,
so now it commented on that of the bound and finally liberated
Prometheus. Except that the suffering hero is no longer only imagined
[vorgestelltl but portrayed [dargestellt], on one level of reality with the
chorus, because of the dialogue, which is suspect as being Socratic.
Instructive in regard to Nietzsche's conception is the fact that, and
the way in which, he quotes Goethe's "Prometheus" ode, without
noting its epochal distance from the myth, because it is important to
him to prevent an ongoing awareness of the fact that the suffering
god is precisely not "man, rising to Titanic stature," who gains culture
by his own efforts and forces the gods "to enter into an alliance with
him." If this was supposed to be the "veritable hymn of impiety,"
there is in any case no talk of it in the tragedy. The background of
the latter is the pitiable condition of man left to his own devices, who
needs a god - and certainly not an Olympian god, who considers his
existence a mistake.
The tragedy "did not exhaust the astounding depth of the myth's
terror," not even, indeed especially not by means of the "cheerfulness"
(which is only reflected back onto it with the help of Goethe) "of
artistic creation that defies all misfortune. "36 Nietzsche has ready a
foil against which to contrast this. If one ignores the attendant bit of
race metaphysics, which deepens the gulf between the Bible and myth,
we are left with the typified distinction between sin and sacrilege. It
is supposed to exclude any similarity between ancient hubris and the
biblical Fall. Prometheus's theft of fire, Nietzsche says, is a sacrilege,
by which man does not 'fall,' but instead for the first time raises
himself to certainty of himself. But what happens to the comparison
to the Fall? Does man, then, cOlnmit sacrilege? Is it not comnlitted
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Part V
on his behalf? That is why Nietzsche vacillates between merely making

Dionysus and Prometheus interchangeable, in their position in tragedy,
or making the Titan and man interchangeable as well; but that deprives
him of any claim still to comprehend something in Aeschylus, who
presents the story of a god in relation to men, and not of men in
relation to themselves. The tragedy can contain the story of a sacrilege,
in the proud sense that Nietzsche intends, only if Prometheus belongs
to the genealogy of the gods, where he may also be a mask of Dionysus,
but not an allegory of man.
For in Aeschylus, the Prometheus story is a drama among gods-
with the sole exception of the figure of 10, who however certainly
does not embody sacrilege against the gods, but rather a pitiable
enduring of their caprice and persecution. In fact the "necessity of
sacrilege imposed upon the Titanically striving individual" only becomes
the "innermost kernel of the Prometheus story" because the one who
commits sacrilege is immortal and can dare to challenge the new god
by favoring man. In this case, the statement that the Greeks only
invented tragedy at all on account of "their need to invent some dignity
for and to incorporate it in sacrilege"37 must be read in a properly
qualified sense.
Nietzsche missed the heart of the difference between sacrilege and
sin. In contrast to an offense against absolute majesty, such as Christian
theology imputes to sin, sacrilege has its greatness and its longevity
only in the fact that the god who is affected by it is not unconditionally
in the right and, still more importantly, cannot do everything. In the
system of the division of powers, the idea does not arise that only the
complete degradation of the sinner satisfies insulted majesty. The
chaining of Prometheus to the Caucasus and the suppression of his
vital energy by the eagle that eats his liver are not, initially, humiliation,
but deprivation of power. The one who could make men independent
of the goodwill of the new gods, or even alienated from them, is made
ineffectual. This is the prudence of the power-holder, not the illogic
of offended majesty. Zeus changes his attitude at the moment when
the danger from another direction becomes evident to him. The sinner
who confronts a God who cannot be injured in any way except by
offending his honor, because everything else is subject to his power,
is not lost in the same way as myth's committer of sacrilege. The
combined imagination of centuries of theologians was necessary in
order to contrive, as 'satisfaction,' what only the theologians' God
himself was supposed to be able to supply.
To Nietzsche, the biblical Fall is too feminine. Only the seducer's
lucrative promise brings about the violation of the divine command.
But the Prometheus story, too, is not one in which a spontaneous
abandonment of his position leads to his proud self-comparison with
the Olympian ruler. The Titan who commits sacrilege is provoked by
Zeus's contempt for his creatures and by his tyrannical withholding
of their elementary necessities of life. One can even reverse Nietzsche's
evaluation. In the biblical story of the Fall, everything with which the
tempter entices is the unknown magnitude of an excess beyond what
is useful in life-is dazzling equality to God-whereas Zeus does not
withhold from man the food of the gods, nectar and ambrosia, but
rather the cook's, the smith's, the baker's, the potter's fire. True, the
biblical God also withholds something from the human beings in Par-
adise, but it is a knowledge that is of questionable value for them and
that is also superfluous under the conditions of Paradise. Nothing
allows us to infer that the lord of the garden is a tyrant. The spontaneity
of curiosity about what is of no use at all in life is entirely attributable
to man. So there is nothing exclusive in the "glory of activity" that
Nietzsche ascribes to Promethean sacrilege; the story is too much one
of help in distress for that. And in the end Nietzsche did not place
too high a value on the kind and the effect of Prometheus's help for
mankind: "Man represents no progress over the animal: The civilized
tenderfoot is an abortion .... "38
The fault here lies in the metaphysically false liberation of Pro-
metheus. It destroys the unity of pain and pleasure as the sustaining
structure in human history. In Nietzsche's view of myth the decisive
thing is that the surmounting of or at least coming to terms with the
underlying stratum of terror and suffering both is necessary, in order
to be able to exist at all, and must never be definitive, so that man
can still remain capable of feeling the power of life. That is why the
world of the Olympians is only a "middle world of art"; it d.?es not
ever manage to be the higher and superior world [Oberwelt und Uberwelt1
that comes in with Platonism and whose disastrously consistent form
will be Christianity. Prometheus is not supposed to be a mediating
figure. He himself- and not only his vultures - belongs to that under-
lying stratum of the "terror and horror of existence." His "Titanic
love for man" also violates Apollinian measure, embodying "over-
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weening pride and excess ... as the truly hostile demons of the non-
Apollinian sphere." He embodies in every way the antithesis of the
"Socratism of morality," of the "frugality and cheerfulness of the
theoretical man" - the antithesis, to put it in a nutshell, of everything
"of which tragedy died. "39
As far as mankind is concerned, Nietzsche basically is on the side
of Zeus when the latter denies that men deserve to live. To let them
live nevertheless is not an answer to the question of the reason for
their existence, but a kind of illegitimate favoritism. Ultimately it is
impotence against a conspiracy of "outcasts."k Therefore we must
relate it not only to the protagonist of the tragedy but also to the
right of the species to exist when Nietzsche retells the old story of
King Midas's hunting of the wise centaur Silenus, whom the king,
when he caught him, questioned regarding the wisdom that he had
learned when he was in Dionysus's train. Midas wants to know what
is good for man. At first the Dionysian is silent, only finally, pressed
by the king, breaking out in laughter at the human species. Since he
is compelled to say what it would be best for anyone not to hear, he
reveals what is, in any case, beyond their reach: The best thing of all
would be the privilege not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. 40
This book, which its author himself described as "image-mad and
image-confused," sees tragedy in a backward extrapolation from its
downfall, which Euripides seals. Here most of what Nietzsche has to
say about the Dionysian derives from Euripides's Bacchae. But that has
only the excessive clarity of something that has been delayed. In
Euripides, Socrates appears disguised as a dramatist, as the author of
the epic that is brought onto the stage, the novel of dialogue. Delusion,
which prevents one from knowing what actions mean and why the
sufferer suffers, is brought to an end when Socrates defines virtue as
knowledge and considers it possible to know, through and through,
what one does and why one does it. That is why Socrates is the hero
in the Platonic dialogue-drama, in which what is at stake is victory in
argumentation, rather that the superior power of fate. The dramatic
form in which tragedy ends is distinguished by the primacy of dialogue
over the chorus, and thus by the pressing forward of an optimistic
dialectics that breaks through the solitude of the sufferer. Loquacity
[Redseligkeit], in the literal sense [i.e., "happiness in talking"], takes the
place of the solitary dumbness of the single protagonist.
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Nietzsche's "questionable book" is sustained by antibourgeois affect.

It opposes a "comfortable" style of existence, for which the tragic
appears as an exotic extravagance. That is why Prometheus must be
the wanton and dream-dancing committer of sacrilege, the barbarian
who loves men without rhyme or reason. What is overlooked here is
the fact that by his deceptive sacrifice and his theft of fire he provides
and guarantees, for the others for whom he stands up, precisely and
only the normal state of existence, at its lowest limit. The exceptional
stiuation' secures only the normal situation; it permits, and practically
requires, the despised "yearning for the idyllic. "41 The antibourgeois
affect produces the bourgeois mode of life. The Titan compels the
others to be what he magnanimously disdains-not only Zeus, as
Nietzsche sees him, but also his Prometheus has, for men, little more
than indulgence, in view of the principle of insufficient reason m that
governs their existence. Men are, when considered strictly, only the
cue for Prometheus's appearance among the actors in tragedy. If he
had been allowed to keep silent, as in the myth, then everything would
have remained concentrated on the gesture of his suffering.
Nietzsche's history of tragedy is a history of decadence, but by no
means a resigned history, written in the embittered consciousness of
irremediable futility. For the history is reversible: from Alexandria,
by way of Socrates, to Aeschylus. 42 Its reversal is opera without re-
citative, as disdain for all demands for 'intelligibility': opera as the
vicarious representative of the unbearable. The "birth of tragedy" is
only the prelude to the rebirth of the tragic, to the aesthetic 'exceptional
situation,' to contempt for virtue as knowledge, for consciousness as
morality. Richard Wagner repeats what Hercules had done for Pro-
metheus, and in doing so fills the myth "with a new and most profound
significance. "43 He answers the question how Prometheus could be
freed, without transforming it into a paltry denouement, close to the
bourgeois contentment of his creatures. "What power was it that freed
Prometheus from his vultures and transformed the myth into a vehicle
of Dionysian wisdom? It is the Herculean power of music. ... " Nietzsche
will have been aware that Hercules kills the death bird but does not
remove the chains, does not alleviate the deeper pain of the immortal's
longing for death-contradicting the vignette that Nietzsche put on
the title page for Wagner to see. Music protects myth from allego-
rization, from the transformation of what had after all been a "juvenile
drearn" into something more amiable, into a "historico-pragrnatical
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juvenile history." Was there a power comparable to Wagner's music

that could prevent Prometheus from returning home to the comfortable
situation of the Attic potters' god in the grove of Academic Apollo?
But the reversibility of history does not lead to the mere symmetry
of its very early and its very late parts. The eschatology ["last things"]
of opera has the equipment with which to surpass the protology ["first
things"] of tragedy. Nietzsche thinks that Aeschylus did not get to the
root of myth. In that case it was natural to imagine that Nietzsche
did this.44 Not to have gotten to the root of myth-for l~ietzsche in
about 1874 that meant: not to have narrated the myth to its end. The
liberation of Prometheus by Hercules was suspected of representing
a flirtation with the deus ex machina, which was produced by the dec-
adence of tragedy. Nietzsche avoids it in his own sketch, which he
begins with the information that Prometheus and his vulture were
"forgotten" when the ancient world of the gods perished. To be for-
gotten-that was a final possible tragedy for an immortal, since after
all Nietzsche himself will be the first to show the gods the mercy of
not having to survive their twilight in history.
So the sketch belongs to the literary category of the rectification of
myth: Prometheus did not surrender to Zeus his mother's secret about
the change in the world regime, and Zeus fell into fate's trap and
"was ruined by his son." The art myth becomes the history of myth,
insofar as one cannot doubt that the son on whom the highest god
is wrecked is Christ. Prometheus let fate take its course; but he himself
was moved into the 'past perfect' by Zeus's downfall, and was forgotten,
along with all the gods, as the ancient world came to an end. There
is no longer any Hercules who could come to free him. Only men
could do it, for in the meantime they are making history.
The new son of the god saved them from destruction in a different
way from the way in which Prometheus had meant to. Zeus had
wanted to destroy men by means of Greek culture itself It was to
spoil life for all who came later, through the burden of imitation and
through envy. The son protects them from this by "hatred for what
is Greek," by stupidity and fear of death-in a word, by the Middle
Ages. Seen from the perspective of the primary constituents of the
Prometheus story, this epoch is a repetition: What results, for men,
after the destruction of the gods and under the new dominion of the
son, can now only be "compared to the conditions before Prometheus's
deed, when he gave them fire." But the new master, too, wants to
619
Chapter 2
destroy human beings; we are not told how, but no doubt it is by

means of aversion to life.
Long before the idea of eternal recurrence seized Nietzsche, by the
lake of Silvaplana, he sketches its basic mythical pattern. The gods'
sequence of generations is not prehistoric, but manifests itself in the
epochs of history as a process of the replacement of the ruling gods,
which always occurs at the expense of men. Thus the Renaissance
too becomes a mythical event: Prometheus sends his brother, Epi-
metheus, who renews the history and remembrance of the Greeks by
means of Pandora (whose significance is always ambiguous). "And
mankind actually is revived again, and Zeus with them- the latter
from a fable embodied in myth." But this Hellenism renewed by
philology deludes men with false friendliness to life, until one comes
and points to the underlying stratum: "Its foundation is recognized
as being terrible and inimitable."
Here we see the author introducing himself into his myth. Nietzsche
made himself into a figure who is the Titan's opponent, because Pro-
metheus had "prevented men from seeing death." The sketch makes
Epimetheus reproach his brother with this, and thus bring him to
approve of his punishment: He had made death invisible for men
under the veil of culture. Thus it becomes theatrically fitting to make
Prometheus suffer precisely from being an immortal. Even the vulture
becomes weary of inexhaustibleness; the liver of his victim grows back
too quickly for him. That too would have been a possible end for the
myth: the satiation of the tormentor (who for Nietzsche is always a
vulture, never an eagle). Now even the most avid one no longer devours,
and lets 'life' proliferate. What an exquisite torture for one. who had
wanted to try his strength against the abyss.
For this Prometheus vision Nietzsche had, in the short time since
the Tragedy book, set aside his aversion to bourgeois denouements.
Everything ends with the dialogue that he had formerly scorned so
much. Zeus, the unnamed son, and Prometheus talk with one another.
They even reach one of those detestable compromises that had been
at the root of Socratism. It is this: The new Zeus sets ProInetheus free
and Prometheus pulverizes his clay figures, so as to relnake them. To
prevent these creatures from noticing how they are Inade into material
for the "individual of the future," Zeus's son grants theIn the meta-
physical consolation of music. Thus the desires of both parties are
fulfilled: Prometheus's, that hurnan beings should continue to eXIst,
620
Part V
and Zeus's, that first they must perish. Even the vulture is allowed to
say something: "Alas, a bird of misfortune, n I have become a myth."
What we are not told is whether Prometheus's reconstruction of
mankind is successful. It would have had to avoid the contradiction
contained in the first Promethean generation, that "man's strength
and knowledge are separated in time," that all wisdom is coupled
with the weakness of age, and deeds and understanding lie at opposite
ends of the course of life. If he could eliminate this antagonism, he
would come close to the superman. The latter is the goal, but the
justification of the conceded destruction of the first mankind is as
problematic as "new men" have always been. And in fact the sketch
ends with the fragment of a sentence: "Prometheus despairs .... "
Why then had he agreed to the compromise with Zeus and the
son, if it was not clear how the new creation could eliminate the
original congenital defect? The answer is given, I think, by a comparison
to the aesthetic genius as conceived by German Classicism: Prometheus
turns out to be capable of being tempted by the opportunity, which
he is offered, to return once again to the primeval creative situation.
The pattern of the barbarian blends with that of the artist. Prometheus
is one of those "natures who search for a material to mold. "45 Zeus
tempts him with the idea of pulverizing men back into the original
pulp, and Christ/Dionysus makes it easy for him to allow himself to
be tempted by contributing music, which makes the destruction tol-
erable through ecstasy. This "Prometheus" rivals the 'total work of
art. '0 Nietzsche had said of Wagner, at about the same time, that he
was "the tragic poet at the conclusion of all religions, of the 'twilight
of the gods,' " and that he had "made use of all of history. "46 That
is also the idea in Nietzsche's fragment of a Prometheus story: to
narrate the myth-in manifestly unsurpassable form-from the per-
spective of its end, and to make himself the last thing of which he
speaks.
Here one can easily see the connection to an idea that Nietzsche
connected with the name of Prometheus only years later, in The Gay
Science: The Titan is the prototypical figure for the self-discovery of
the divinity of man. All religion would then be only exercise and
prologue with a view to individual human beings one day being able
"to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god, and his whole power of
self-redemption." Man would not have known anything about this
possibility. The new interpretation of Prometheus flows from this: "Did
621
Chapter 2
Prometheus have to fancy first that he had stolen the light and then
pay for that-before he finally discovered that he had created the
light by coveting the light and that not only man but also the god
was the work of his own hands and had been mere clay in his hands?
All mere images of the maker-no less than the fancy, the theft, the
Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia [Prometheus
story] of all seekers after knowledge?"47 Ultimately, Nietzsche's tragic
hero becomes the "ideal of the most high-spirited, alive, and world-
affirming human being who has not only come to terms and learned
to get along with whatever was and is, but who wants to have what
was and is repeated into all eternity, shouting insatiably de capo [from
the beginningl-not only to himself but to the whole play and spectacle,
and not only to a spectacle but at bottom to him who needs precisely
this spectacle - and who makes it necessary because again and again
he needs himself and makes himself necessary- -What? And this
wouldn't be-circulus vitiosus deus [a vicious circle godl?"48
This 'reoccupation' makes what was formerly the fundamental pat-
tern of myth itself into the promoter of eternal recurrence. But does
it still correspond to the figure that had represented myth for Nietzsche?
Can Prometheus be imagined as one who ever cried "da capo"? The
idea of eternal recurrence is indeed one myth as the form of myth as
such; but precisely because the mere form is set off against the mythical
matter, this myth loses its original capacity to carry names and to
have stories, instead of one unique 'history.' It is true that the idea
of eternal recurrence is involved in Nietzsche's Prometheus story; but
in the moment when it is articulated, it destroys every myth from
which it could be derived. The myths are definitively swallowed up,
in favor of the one myth of the eternal recurrence of the same. During
the years of the sketches on "revaluation" [Umwertung], Nietzsche wrote:
"One may hope that man will rise so high that what to him were
previously the highest things, for example faith in God, appear childlike,
childish, and touching, indeed so that he does what he has done with
all myths, that is, transforms them into children's stories and fairy
tales. "49 But that is just what once was not supposed to be permitted
to the Greek enlightenment and was supposed to have constituted
the wantonness of every later enlightenment.
According to Freud's A uto biograph ical Study of 1925, the "philosopher
whose guesses and intuitions often agree in the most astonishing "vay
with the laborious findings of psychoanalysis was for a long time
622
Part V
avoided by me on that very account. "P Freud does not mention

Nietzsche even where such mention is more than due. But Nietzsche's
identity myth also, the myth of Prometheus, is obstinately passed over
by Freud, precisely where citing it is inescapably natural: in his use
of the institutionalization of the possession of fire as an example for
his theory of the origin of culture. What Freud offers, without men-
tioning it, here, is actually a countermyth to Prometheus.
The remains of fire places are accepted as reliable indications of
the hominid character of the fossils associated with them. Fire is related
to the definition of man as a toolmaker. Fire places are already places
of interaction with the element in its domesticated form. There is a
difference between this and the traces of the first stone implements
that were found handy or were crudely shaped. Stone is a passive
substratum on which culture operates, the use of which as a tool was
discovered through the activity of throwing. Fire is a power of nature,
one of the threats to early human existence. The taming and protection
of fire are stages in a process that was not originally directed.
No doubt it was this fact that restrained Freud from admitting
Prometheus's name, too, into psychoanalysis's calendar of saints. The
fire that Prometheus snatches from heaven is a culture fire: the fire
of the hearth and the forge. The prehistory of this fire, a history of
fear and warding off, is omitted here. Prometheus brings men culture
by eliminating a terrible lack on their part, not by protecting them
against devastating powers of nature. Also not by protecting them
against powers in their own nature.
In his late treatise of 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud
imagined the hypothetical myth of the origin of culture as a process
of renunciation. Cultureq means, according to his definition, "the whole
sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our
lives from those of our animal ancestors and which serve two pur-
poses-namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual
relations. "r Among the achievements that are directed against nature,
the taming of fire stands out "as a quite extraordinary and unexampled
achievement. "
Only in a footnote to this passage does a " conjecture about the
origin of this human feat" enter the mythical horizon of origins-a
conjecture based on psychoanalytic material that [Freud says] is in-
complete and not susceptible to reliable interpretation. The funda-
mental achievement of the origin of culture can only be one involving
623
Chapter 2
the renunciation of gaining pleasure. For it to be possible to introduce

the renunciation, a more original defensive action has to have pleasure
attached to it. Freud sees this in the extinguishing of naturally generated
fire by means of a stream of urine. The gain of pleasure that is
associated with this is explained by the aboriginal perception-pre-
supposed by Freud, on the basis of mythical material, as undoubted-
of the flame as a phallic image. As soon as we accept this explanation
of the gain of pleasure through the defensive action, sparing the fire
turns into a collision between the pleasure principle and the reality
principle, which leads to a self-imposed restriction to the protection
and useful employment of fire. "The first person to renounce this
desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue
it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation,
he had tamed the natural force of fire." Freud's unnamed Prometheus
is not a figure of defiant pretension, but of protective renunciation.
The relation between pretension and renunciation that is so extremely
clear in the origin of modem science would then reach back to the
roots of human civilization.
The next step, then, is to explain that the anatomical difference
between the sexes programs woman's aptitude for the role of guardian
of the hearth fire and the temple fire. For her, the temptation to
reverse the endangered process of becoming human, to surrender the
gain of culture again in return for the gain of pleasure, does not exist.
The male cannot guarantee the irreversibility of the process. What he
must-unreliably-bind himself not to do, she-reliably-cannot do
at all.
That may not yet have been sufficient. The gods are connected to
those early renunciations in such a way as to punish infringements
against them and to favor observance of them. The mythical gods,
having arisen perhaps from anxiety in the face of the unknown and
from giving names to it, become divine protectors of civilization, which
consists only of what is known to man because he made it. They
remain this as long as man is not able to secure the totality of his
original renunciations with the aid of institutions and sanctions. By
having usurped this delegated capacity, he has "almost become a god
himself" This formula has lost almost all of its former grandeur \\Then
Freud adds that man here is, "as it were, a kind of prosthetic god."
When man himself carries out the protection of the renunciation
that is at the root of all culture, this makes that renunciation-as
624
Part V
Freud's blasphemous formula for man makes plain-into a contestable,

revocable action. To give a name to a renunciation that was previously
unrecognized already means-potentially-to break with it. That may
not, cannot, have been in Freud's mind when, in spite of his exposure
and depreciation of the "prosthetic god," he sketched a fanciful prospect
of the future of the successful protector of fire: "Future ages will bring
with them new and probably unimaginably great advances in this field
of civilization and will increase man's likeness to God still more"-
though he does not pass over the fact that "present-day man does
not feel happy in his Godlike character."
To be a god still continues to be distinguished by the quality of
autarky; but it is an autarky that is inseparably coupled to renouncing
eudaemonia with a rigor that was as yet unknown in the ancient world.
Prometheus, as the establisher of culture, could be the bringer of
happiness whose plan was spoiled only by Pandora; that has become
impossible when human culture is subjected to the most staggering
demands for renunciation. Jung claims to have objected, to Freud,
that this hypothesis, if it is thought through to the end, leads to a
devastating annihilating judgment upon culture, which appears "as a
mere farce, the morbid consequence of repressed sexuality." Freud
agreed: " ... so it is, and that is just a curse of fate against which we
are powerless to contend. "50
Suddenly it becomes evident why, in Freud's text on the origin of
culture, Prometheus appears only insofar as one is left to comprehend
the fact that the Titan's name cannot be mentioned. Fire could not
be brought to man; the curse laid on the god who had been connected
with the theft of fire cannot be paid and endured in the distant Caucasus.
It is present in every act of culture. The preconditions of a blasphemous
action have been eliminated. The gods' interim function can only be
that of protecting fire; if it were extinguished - if man returned to the
gain of pleasure- they would immediately lose their title to existence.
Freud's imagined account is, every step of the way, the countermyth
to the myth of Prometheus. If renunciation is the root of culture, then
such a myth can only be told if it reports the negation of an action.
Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods; Freud's primeval man must
merely give up pissing in the fire. The role of woman in the process
by which man becomes civilized is based on one of her most incidental
incapacities. But to nature-if indeed nature functions as an abstract
625
Chapter 2
subject-it is always safer if a species cannot do something than if it

merely does not want to.
One of the final transformations of a myth turns out to be its
unmistakable suppression. It is brought to an end when even its un-
named outlines are given out as being a pretended recollection that
disguises an insurmountable renunciation. When Freud, two years
after Civilization and Its Discontents, becomes involved in a controversy
over just this "incidental" footnote, he has to mention the Titan by
name after all.
In the reply, "On the Acquisition of Fire," he does gratefully ac-
knowledge aid in the form of the "Mongolian law against 'pissing on
ashes,' " but he engages in a noteworthy contortion in order to find
confirmation of his renunciation variant in the Prometheus myth. There,
evidently, "resistance" had been at work, and had brought about "the
distortions which must be expected to occur in the transition from
facts to the contents of a myth." They are familiar to the analyst, "of
the same sort as, and no worse than, those which we acknowledge
every day,"S which occur on the way from childhood experience to
dreams.
Translator's Notes
a. By archaic one should understand, in accordance with the Greek, not only "ancient" but
also "associated with the beginnings" (the archai).
b. One of Rudolf Otto's characterizations of "the numinous."
c. Deutschland: Ein Wintermarchen [Germany: A Winter's Tale] (I844). See note 12 to this chapter.
d. See the text related to note 8 in this chapter.
e. Ludwig Borne (I 786-1837) was another German Jewish writer who spent the later years of
his life in Paris.
f. In his last years Heine reverted to an (at least ironical) theism. He was bedridden from 1848
until his death in 1856 as a result of an "apparently venereal disease" (EnC)'c/opedia Briltannica)
that affected his spine.
g. The Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is concerned with the illusions
that reason falls prey to when it is not aware of its own limits, especially of its restriction to
"phenomena," to things as they appear.
h. Gesamtkunslwerk, a concept that was developed by Richard Wagner.

626
Part V
i. Basic Writings cf Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 31-32.
j. The famous statement of the Chorus of Elders in Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus, line 1225,
which Nietzsche quotes in the section of The Birth cf Tragedy that is discussed in the next
paragraph. (See also the text to note 40.) This dictum is a central citation in Blumenberg's
important chapter "The Cosmos and Tragedy," in Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1975), p. 16.
k. This word is in English in the original.
1. Ausnahmezustand "exceptional situation" is also translated as "state of emergency" in political

contexts: a situation in which exceptional measures must be taken.
m. See note t to the Translator's Introduction.
n. Ungliicksvogel is a colloquial byword for someone who is continually engaged in lamentation.
o. See note h.
p. S. Freud, Complete Psychological Works (London: Hogarth Press, 1953- ), vol. 20, p. 60.
q. Kultur. Consistent with Freud's remark that "I scorn to distinguish between culture and
civilization" (The Future cf an Illusion, in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21, p. 6), Kultur is often
rendered as "civilization" in the standard translations, but I have stuck to "culture," where
possible, so as not to confuse the reader by contradicting common and dictionary usage.
r. Freud, Complete Psychological Works, vol. 21, p. 89. The quotations in the next four paragraphs
are from pp. 90-92 of the same volume.
s. Ibid., vol. 22, p. 187.

3
To Bring to an End, If Not
Myth, Then at Least One Myth
It is awful that one is, oneself, both the eagle and Prometheus; both
in one person, the one who lacerates and the one vvho is lacerated.
-Picasso
It is not by chance that the nineteenth century, which claimed to have

recognized itself in so many ways in Prometheus, came to an end with
a deformation of the myth into the grotesque. Andre Gide's Promithie
mal enchaini [Prometheus misboundl appears in 1899. By an act of
violence, it pushes the configuration to the point of absurdity, as one
can presume to do only when familiarity with its eidetic content is
still guaranteed, but no longer needs to be taken seriously. Anyone
who had entered into Nietzsche's intense feeling for [Prometheus as]
the Dionysian emblem, scarcely three decades earlier, had to feel that
he was being made fun of- and he was meant to feel that. An end
is sought, with this figure - an end that has to mark another end. For
this century acquiesced in the fact of its running out, as emphatically
as though by that means alone unknown and unlimited possibilities
of new beginnings were unlocked.
Even before Freud will reveal to their contemporaries what this sort
of thing means, Gide makes the myth end with a totem meal: Pro-
rnetheus ends by giving a dinner party for his friends, at which he
sets before them, roasted, the cannibal bird, \vhich has been fed up
from a carrion bird into an eagle and fattened on his conscience lcon-
science, consciousness]. The torment of its feeding on him, \vhich has
628
Part V
continued since primeval times, is canceled out in the brief moment

of a culinary enjoyment that runs in the opposite direction. The point-
that o~ly the aesthetic can be the essence of all torments - is pushed
a step further yet: The book that preserves the story of Prometheus's
conscience and consciousness is written with the quills of the eagle-
now eaten-who had become that conscience and consciousness. The
myth has not only been entirely dissolved into poetry, it contributes
to the poetry's production in the most banal manner: technically.
It is inevitable that, for his grotesque, Prometheus has come to
Paris. He is not the "Unbound," in any elevated sense of this word-
no one who, as the guarantor of a warning and illumination that he
sacrilegiously conveyed to man, would have had to extricate himself
from the irate grasp of another. As though the verdict had long since
been untenable and forgotten, the unchaining took place like the most
casual matter of course. "When, on the summit of the Caucasus,
Prometheus had become fully aware that his chains, fetters, strait-
waistcoats, prison walls and other scruples, taking them all in all, were
giving him pins and needles, in order to change his posture he rose
on his left side, stretched out his right arm, and, between four and
five o'clock on an autumn afternoon, walked down the boulevard
which leads from the Madaleine to the Opera." I This is a pure rep-
resentation of Gide's aesthetic central idea, of the acte gratuit [free,
gratuitous act], a descendant of the theological concept of God's un-
earnable and rationally inexplicable act of grace, and here the structural
principle of the grotesque (sotie), of its constant demonstrative resistance
to any inquiry a~ to its motive and what it is 'doing.' One may say
that it is no exhaustion of the myth's potential, but on the contrary
a final defiance of the myth, for which a Hercules would be necessary.
But the casualness- with which Prometheus frees himself does never-
theless have the pointed meaning that one no longer knows at all
what the issue was.
Part of this is the fact that Zeus has long since left his [former] office.
He exercises authority in an up-to-date manner, as a banker, and this
gives him, more than ever, the means to put his author's acte gratuit
into effect. What, in the myth, had been the great ambiguity of the
withholding of fire - was it ill will toward the despised creatures of
another god, or was it the protection of heaven's property against the
grasp of those who were unworthy? - has become the mere caricature
in the idea of the groundless will. Zeus entangles men in a story that
629
Chapter 3
they cannot comprehend, which is presented on the level of whim,

and whose unexplained begirming spins itself out in unexplained actions
and undeserved consequences of these actions. a It is the early realization
of what Gide, almost three decades later, in The Counterfeiters, makes
Edouard record in his diary as a saying of old La Perouse: "Dieu se
moque de moi. II s'amuse. Je crois qu'il joue avec nous comme un
chat avec une souris" [God makes fun of me. He amuses himself I
think he plays with us like a cat with a mouse]. For the meaning of
this is, in the end, simply that when it is viewed from outside, the
acte gratuite cannot be accepted aesthetically, because it cannot be
born, morally. Even for the aesthetic attitude, morality is taken for
granted, because it would make that attitude impossible if it were not.
Only where there is no need for any action at all, or where action is
a travesty of a natural event, is there nothing that would have to be
taken for granted.
To bring myth to an end was once supposed to have been the work
of logos. This consciousness of itself on the part of philosophy-or
better, of the historians of philosophy-is contradicted by the fact that
work aimed at putting an end to myth is again and again accomplished
in the form of a metaphor of myth. To make the principle of insufficient
reason, b in the acte gratuit, into the central idea of aesthetics means
to mythicize aesthetics exactly as it had been mythicized by, for ex-
ample, the idea of "genius." The world itself must becon1e the most
groundless thing in the world so that it can tolerate groundless worlds
alongside it, in it, in opposition to it. Only in a universe that is completely
free of compelling reasons is the aesthetic object able to be a match
for everything else.
The world's naked contingency, the ultimate impossibility of giving
reasons for it, unexpectedly makes everything equal in the face of the
claim to enjoyment. If it would have taken so little to prevent there
being anything at all, then the fact that there is not nothing is, after
all, already something. In another passage in The Counterfeiters, Gide
makes his character Armand say: "Un tout petit peu moins: Ie non-
etre. Dieu n'aurait pas cree Ie monde. Rien n' eut ete ... " fA very little
bit less: Nonexistence. God would not have created the world. Nothing
would have existed ... 1. The "beautiful," or whatever may be given
out as such at any given tilne, is not only the improbable in the
rnechanism of nature but ah'eady the improbability, itself, that there
is anything at all and that anything at all occurs. Therefore one 111ay
630
Part V
'understate': The sheer minimum of anything-at-all must appear. Pro-

metheus must change his position just a little ....
Only where sufficiency is lacking does the point exist at which what
is still too little sud?enly becomes just enough. It is on this borderline
that the grotesque makes its home; it makes absurdity into under-
statement. Myth can no longer take place, because 'too little' happens,
although it is not the case that nothing happens. The grotesque shows
how much is necessary to enable the end to take place - to enable
the absence of events to become an event. The form that Gide gave
to the myth of Prometheus, in order to advertise its end, is that of
the roman pur ["pure novel"], even if, in the first edition of 1899, there
is as yet no declaration of its genre. The waiter in the Paris restaurant
introduces Prometheus to Mr. Cocles and Mr. Damocles, who have
become entangled in the chain of events that was caused by Zeus.
" 'Prometheus,' resumed Damocles. - 'Excuse me, sir, but it seems
to me that this name has already .... ' 'Oh!' intenupted Prometheus
immediately, 'that is of no importance whatsoever.' "
But why, precisely, Prometheus? One could say that the disap-
pearance of the mythical figure in the modern metropolis, as the
eschaton of myth [its 'last thing,' as in eschatology], could only be exhibited
in the example where its intensity is greatest, and that to ascertain
this one only needs to ask Nietzsche, whom Gide begins to appropriate
in these years. Perhaps one can nevertheless begin an answer thus:
If myth has something to do with the nameless being given names,
the formless receiving form, the bestiary becoming human, and that
which is already human in form being humanized, then the center of
the pantheon must lie precisely where what is at issue is the origin
and the continuance of the figure that is man. Even when this focus
is fading away, something of the perils of the beginning would still
have to be perceptible.
Prometheus, the potter of man, is again involved, at this end of his
myth too (the end that Gide intended for him), in man's becoming
man. This is because the casual character of the acte gratuit is also a
'datum' of anthropology: It makes the creature who does not intend
to do anything 'for nothing' into a human creature. The characteristic
quality of the God of hidden decisions of grace, of the terror of 'jus-
tification,' unexpectedly becomes the manifestation of self-exemption
from interhunlan calculation, from reference to utility and from the
seriousness of getting results. Zeus, the banker, who starts the action
631
Chapter 3
with the five-hundred-franc note, is not retarded in regard to the

process of humanization, but hypertrophic-he is a caricature of
Nietzsche's superman.
Zeus's game is not only a game of power; it presupposes that those
who are ensnared in it allow themselves to be played with. The acte
gratuit lives by the fact that the others are on the lookout for the
accident that it represents for them. Here, too, Prometheus is still the
antipode of Zeus, because for him this ability to become involved is
only the initial condition of the process of becoming human. Becoming
capable even of the acte gratuit frees one from seeing it only in its
external aspect, as the whim of another. The waiter confirms this for
Prometheus; he had long thought that it was this that distinguished
man from the beasts. But his experience taught him the reverse. Man
is .the only creature that is incapable of doing something gratis. Pro-
metheus becomes the 'hermeneut' [interpreter] of his own history
when he understands it as the history of self-consciousness. Groundless
action is the test of this: the test of the subject's pure capacity not to
be consumed in his action but to be an onlooker at it. In the language
of the myth, to achieve consciousness is to recognize one's eagle and
to enter into the 'either-or' of being eaten or eating. The totem meal
that Prometheus arranges is the sacrament of no longer being eaten.
The story of the two people whom Zeus entangles in his 'action' is
like a thought experiment in regard to the convergence of the ground-
lessness of the act with the improbability of being affected by it, that
is, the convergence of distance from the moral realm with proxill1ity
to the aesthetic. Cocles, who picks up Zeus's handkerchief from the
street, knows nothing about his parents, nothing about the reason for
his existence, and was looking for nothing but "some reason for con-
tinuing to live." He went into the street, he says, in order to find SOlne
kind of determining influence there. "I thought my destiny \vould
depend on the first thing that happened to me; for I was not my O\\1n
maker. ... " That one was not one's o\-\'n maker defines the deficiency
of self-consciousness, which (as always) del-ives fi-om the epistemological
axiom that we possess insight, ultimately, only into \\That we have
lnade, ourselves. Here, the idea of the self-creation of the essfntia
lessencesl by the existentia lexistences] is still remote; in Sartre's dralna
it brings Orestes and Zeus to the point of cOlnplete lTIutual indifference.
What binds Codes to Zeus is the tiny deflection, by the accident, that
632
Part V
his undetermined existence requires in. order to be relieved of con-

tinuing to search for its justification.
The difficulty of not being able to have made oneself, which drives
men into Zeus's snares, preestablishes the sense of what Prometheus,
as the mythical maker of men, can mean by his offer, to his creatures,
to make 'men' of them. Only since his martyrdom on the Caucasus
has he become capable not only of making human-formed creatures
from clay but also of making these into 'men.' The logic of what he
had begun, in the myth, coincides with the ritual of ending the myth:
The totem meal becomes an action signaling the alliance of them for
whom it is only by the end of the myth that they can give their
boundlessness a self-consciousness that is no longer in search of Zeus's
acte gratuit, but has itself become capable of such an act.
Thus Prometheus, the potter of man, becomes the awakener of his
creatures' consciousness, the one who gives the memorial meal for
myth. This feature illuminates, for the first time, the subtle turning
at the end, in which Prometheus writes down his story-as a story
that has been concluded-with a quill from his eagle. Myth is made
completely aesthetic, for the first time, when a work of art results
from it in a way that is (deviously) 'realistic.' The aesthetic enjoyment
consists in the distance that is displayed, vis-a.-vis that which, as some-
thing that has become impossible, lies behind it.
Has myth been brought to an end when, and because, it has been
made into a burlesque-or, more accurately, when it has become
possible for it to be one? The fact that something has come to an end
derives its importance, as a threat or a comfort, exclusively from what
it was that succumbed to this treatment. The evidence that the end
has already taken place cannot always be produced by pointing out
the vacant place where what was previously present could be displayed.
Work on myth contains the suspicion that its success at the same time
implies the loss of a certainty. There is no modality of remembering
myth other than that of work on it; but neither is there any success
in this work other than that of exhibiting the ultimate possible way
of dealing with [the] myth-which runs the inescapable risk of being
refuted, of being convicted of implying a still-unfulfilled claim, by [the
appearance of] yet another possible way.
In contrast to all history, in which the epochs take over from one
another with the consciousness that now, finally, matters are getting
serious, that, after so much frivolous squandering of man's best po-
633
Chapter 3
tential, now, finally, everything is at stake-in contrast to this, every

step of work on myth is a dismantling of the old seriousness; even
the art myths of the end of art or of the death of God are made this
way. What comes after such an end and such a death, the myth does
not go on to promise. Does it leave this to the philosophers, who are
confident that only then something better would certainly occur to
them? Work on myth knows no Sabbath ["seventh day"] on which it
would confirm, retrospectively, that the god of the myths is dead. It
knows that the Christianized exclamation that the great Pan is dead c
was itself a myth, a piece of work on myth, furnishing the mythical
counterpart of a dogma that lays claim to absolute realism -like the
falling silent of the ancient oracles. There is no end of myth, although
aesthetic feats of strength aimed at bringing it to an end occur again
and again. We have something comparable as an aesthetic event when
we are dealing with a traditional pattern: The assertion that a theatrical
production attempts something unsurpassable, that it furnishes an
"Endgame," has become an everyday phrase. It is even part of the
onlooker's experience that he has to ask himself, What would still be
possible after this?
Kafka's 'rectifications' of the Prometheus myth,2 from the year 1918,
are part of its eschatology. That is why the dazed reader of this short
text, which does not even fill up a page, asks himself, and is meant
to ask: What would still be left to do? It almost goes without saying
that the reader feels that he is present at an action. The old phrase
that what is at stake is not just words is exemplified by this, which is
not meant to be just one text among others, but, in relation to its
archetype, something ultimate. If one thinks back to Nietzsche's 'rec-
tification,' it makes the myth into something that reproduces history,
and thus at the same time into something that integrates history into
itself as its o\vn episode. Kafka makes the pluralism of interpretations,
as a simulation of historicism and its relativization of how it really
was, in fact, rl into the ironical form of his 'rectification.' His retractionsC'
seem merely to stand side by side, as though they were offered for
the reader to choose between, as though to test his affinity for each
variant in turn. But the irony of plurality, in tum, sets the relativism
aside, overcomes it by means of the evidence of completeness: What
could still be said in addition, what could be added to these 'versions'?
When Kafka begins by saying that four legends infonn us about
Prometheus, these are not arbitrarily interchangeable; instead, they
634
Part V
are a sequence that exhibits the proce~s, in its form, all the way to
the end. The interpretations do not stand side by side; they surpass
one another. It is not by accident that everything ends with the words
to end. On the one hand, the simulation of philological painstakingness
is part of the publicly displaced multiplicity of meaning that presents
itself as historicist; on the other hand, no version is supposed to deny
or to have lost its derivation from a "ground of truth." The four
legends "inform us" [berichten] about Prometheus, and this word, stand-
ing at the beginning, is not modified in any way. The reality is not
guaranteed by the agreement of those who inform us about it, that
is, by the exclusion of their subjectivity, but rather precisely by the
fact that even such widely differing reports undeniably have the same
purport [dasselbe meinen], without saying the same thing. This multiplicity
of meaning is directed against the ideal of scientific objectivity and
does not reduce reality's compelling power to its contents, which can
be systematically registered. f.
The first of the four legends corresponds more or less to the tra-
ditional myth, though it is intensified by the statement that Prometheus
was chained to the Caucasus "for betraying the gods to men." No
individual god is mentioned as the specific one who was betrayed;
indeed, the fact that Prometheus himself is a god does not seem to
be taken into account, either. So it is also the anonymous "gods" who
send the eagles-in the plural, like this-to feed on Prometheus's
liver.
In the second version only these birds remain on the scene, and
they afflict Prometheus so much that he presses himself deeper and
deeper into the rock, to escape their tearing beaks - "until he became
one with it." The ultimate freedom from being affected, which no
longer seems to be ensured by the immortality of a god, still lies in
merging with the rock, which cannot be affected by any pain but is,
again, the pure unfeelingness of nature.
The third version contains an element that is also found in Nietzsche's
fragment, in which the change of gods, from the father to the son,
caused the culture-founder, on the Caucasus, to be forgotten. Kafka,
too, makes Prometheus be forgotten, in a sequence that intensifies
the forgottenness in such a way that at the end of time, as a result
of the rnere passage of time, there is again a form of absolute freedom
from being affected. First, his deed, the betrayal, was forgotten, and
then: "the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot." Nonidentity
635
Chapter 3
as autoamnesia is a pure representation of being beyond the reach

of persecution.
The fourth version resembles the third one, but instead of the
process of forgetting, it uses that of growing weary. This is explained
as a result of groundlessness: That which becomes groundless does
not persist in consciousness. And again, there is the passage up the
scale, from the punishing gods to the figure of the one who is punished:
"The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed
wearily." What remains, here too, is the stone, because it is ground
[Grund, "earth"] and therefore needs no ground [Grund, "reason"]: Not
needing explanation is the ground of its incontestability. The metaphor
of an original stratum underlying all events, which itself no longer
requires justification - no longer requires a theodicy - extends from
Goethe's "granite" to Kafka's "inexplicable mass of rock." Kafka's
rectification of the myth concludes with two sentences that retro-
spectively amplify its beginning, insofar as they make the mere factual
statement that there are four legends into the expression of an effort,
which is explicitly characterized as an explanatory effort and the dif-
ficulty of which is defined as that of explaining the inexplicable: "The
legend tries to explain the inexplicable. As it comes out of a ground
of truth, it has to end in the inexplicable again."
One can regard Kafka's ostensibly traditional versions of the story
as a formal parody of a philological collation. But in their content they
are in fact closer to what Nietzsche attempted in his amplification of
the Prometheus myth: to embed history in-to make it merge into-
the nonhistorical. Kafka makes the 'action' disappear in nature, in its
simply unmoved, indestructible, unhistorical form as the mass of rock.
Since one can scarcely assume that Kafka's third version was derived
in any way from Nietzsche's sketch, it becomes still more instructive
in regard to what work remains to be done on this myth: not the
antithesis of myth and logos, of prehistory and history, of barbarism
and culture, but the return of what had been a unique, futile, and,
as it were, disconcerted movement, on the part of nature, to its con-
gealment, to the hieratic gesture of definitive refusal. Only the non-
organic outlasts history. It does so at the cost of being the inexplicable-
for which, admittedly, no one is there any longer to demand an
explanation.
If one looks for analogous statements from other sourc~s besides
this magnificent and relentless imagination, one encount~rs the ar-
636
Part V
gument, in the latter half of the ninetee~th century, between optimism

about progress and the antithetical principle, in physics, of heat death-
the second law of thermodynamics, the great model to which Sigmund
Freud still related and subordinated the organic and the psychic realms
when, in 1920, he inserted the death instinct into his system (which
was always drawing nearer to the mythical).
Kafka's text is not one reception of the myth, nor is it the sum of
its receptions during a traceable stretch of time; instead, it is a myth-
icization of this reception history itself, and in that respect it is again
very close to what Nietzsche had already attempted. We are no longer
told what precedes the statuesque scene in the Caucasus. Everything
that went before has been absorbed in that scene, under the mere
rubric of betrayal of the gods to men. The reception has worked up
the story as though it had never existed. It is the epitome of mythical
circumstantiality itself-of a circumstantiality that is not narrated in
the myth but carried out on it. We are no longer supposed to be able
to perceive any of the formal freedom to vary the myth, or of the
ease of dealing with it, as material, that an attitude that acknowledged
itself to be free and creative would permit. The evidence of a density
that leaves no latitude for any thing- the density that the rock pos-
sesses - is 'manufactured. 'g Only a temporal reversal would still be
thinkable: Prometheus steps forth from the rock again and presents
himself afresh to his tormentors. The eschatological melancholy that
lies over the whole forbids one to give way, even for a moment, to
this imaginative license. Why should the world have to continue in
existence if there is nothing more to say?
But what if there were still something to say, after all?
Translator's Notes
a. In the first 'scene' of Prometheus Misbound, Zeus, the banker, drops his handkerchief in a
crowded boulevard; he asks the person who happens to pick it up and return it to him to
address (to anyone he wishes) an envelope, which contains a five-hundred-fTanc note; and
then he slaps the person's cheek. The consequences of these acts constitute a large part of the
remainder of the story. .
b. See note t to the Translator's Introduction.
c. Plutarch reports that during the reign of Tiberius (A.D. 14-37), passengers on a ship passing
near the Isle of Paxos heard a loud voice calling out that the gTeat god Pan was dead. Christians
have interpreted this to mean that Christ's advent put the pagan gods out of circulation.
637
Chapter 3
d. Wie es denn wirklich gewesen sei, a reminder of Leopold von Ranke's famous statement that
the purpose of historiography is to describe wie es eigentLich gewesen-what the past was really
like.
e. As will be seen in the paraphrases that follow, in the text, Kafka's versions all involve various
kinds of (what might be called) retraction, or shrinkage.
f ProtokoLLiert: collected, like "observations" or "sense-data"-in what the Vienna Circle positivists
called ProtokoLLsatze.
g. Erzeugt, that is, not self-generated.

Notes
Part I
Chapter 2
1. Herodotus, Histories II 50-53, trans. A. D. Godley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1934). It is not accidental that in this context
'gods' and 'cosmos' are juxtaposed: The Pelasgians, he says, had called them theoi ["gods"]
because they established (thentes) everything "in conformity with order" (kosmO). Friedrich August
Wolf discussed this passage from Herodotus in his lectures "On the Archaelogy of the Greeks"
in the winter semester of 1812-1813 in Berlin, as we know from Schopenhauer's transcript:
lIal1dschr{ftLicher Nachla5s, ed. A. Hlibscher (Frankfurt: W. Kramer, 1966- ), vol. 2, p. 234.
Schopenhauer himself comments in this connection that "in the beginning and for a long
time" the Greeks would have had only "the Muses in general," and only later would have
given them individual names. The postscript marked "Ego 1839" shows that this subject
interested him in relation to his philosophical theme of individuation: The gods arc initially
there as something universal; only then are they equipped with individual names. That is
something that always suggests itself to the study of religion, and Usener's merit was precisely
the linkage of the original experience with the finding of names: Hermann Usener, Go·ltfTnamen.
Versuch finer Lehre von der religiosen Begrifftbildung (Bonn, 1896). Wilamowitz advised Usener early
on of his disagreement with the idea of the flmdamental function of the names of the gods,
because he suspected it of being "the foundation pillar of a great edifice" and did not want
to value words so highly, but in fact saw in the pluralism of gods the disintegration of a gn'at
original idea of the Hellenic spirit, a disintegration that could never be allowed to be the
original state: "The path that you pursue, proceeding from what is most individual of all to
what is universal, is a path that must also be traveled: But God is not younger than the gods,
and I want to tl)' once, if he allows me, to take him as my starting point." Let tel' dated
November 7, 1895, in UsenfT Wid H'iLamowitz.. Eill Briejwf'rfLSf'L 18 7o-190~ (Leipzig: Teubner,
1934), pp. 55-56.
2. GcrsChOlll Scholcm, Ubn ezmge Grundb()grijje drs judoltulI1s (Frankfurt: Suhrkalllp, 1970),
p. 107. The mysticism of the Cabala fIrst appears around 1200 in southern France and Spain,
and has its flowering around 1300: C. Scholem, Dif'iidisrhr ,\1ystik in ihrrrl 1/([lljJtsfriJ'1111n1go1
[Major trends in Jewish mysticism], 2d ed. (Frankfl.lrt: Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 128.
640
Notes to Pages 37-49
3. Walter Benjamin, "On Language, and on the Language of Man," i!:Rejlections, trans. E. Jephcott
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 323. Original: "Uber Sprache iiberhaupt und
tiber die Sprache des Menschen," in GesammeLte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-1982),
vol. 2, pt. 1, p. 148.
4. A. Gundert, Marie Hesse. Ein Lebensbild in Briifen und Tagebiichern (Stuttgart, 1934; 2d ed.,
Frankfurt: Insel, 1977), p. 158.
5. G. Simmel, Fragmente und AuJsatu. Aus dem NachLass und VerOffentlichungen der letzten Jahre
(Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1923; rptd. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967), p. 73.
6. H. L. Strack and P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum neuen Testament aus TaLmud und Midrasch
(Munich: Beck, J 922-196 1), vol. 1, pp. 15-18; G. Kittel, "Thamar," in TheoLogicaL Dictionary if
the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans,
1964-1976), vol. 3, pp. 1-3; henceforth cited as Theological Dictionary if the New Testament, ed.
Kittel; original: TheoLogisches WO"rterbuch zum Neuen Testament, G. Kittel (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1932-1979), vol. 3, pp. 1-3. [The paging of articles in the translation of this work is so close
to that in the original that I will henceforth omit references to the originaL]
7. W. Marg, in his commentary on his translation of Hesiod's Samtliche Gedichte (Zurich: Artemis,
1970), pp. 143-144. Namelessness also appears elsewhere in Hesiod as a means by which to
let old terrors still show through (p. 169, on Theogony 333-336).
8. J. Chelhod, Les structures du sacri chez Les A rabes (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1964), p. 98;
German translation in C. Colpe (ed.), Die Diskussion um das 'HeiLige' (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1977), p. 206. Islamic mysticism, Chelhod says, is "not certain whether Allah
is God's real name"; it believes that of God's hundred names, ninety-pine are surnames and
only the hundredth is his real name, known only to a few initiates, which confers knowledge
of and power over nature and death: Les structures du sacri . .. , p. 99; Die Diskussion um das
'Heilige,' p. 207.
9. M. Grosser, The Discovery if Neptune (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), pp.
123-127.
10. Plato, Cratylus 401 B.
11. Heine, Aufuichnungen, in Samtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

Buchgesellschaft,1968- ), vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 627.
12. J.
Presser, NapoLeon. Historie en Legende (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1946), p. 87; in German:
NapoLeon. Das Leben und die Legende (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1977), pp. 91-92.
13. Presser, NapoLeon. Historie en Legende, pp. 47-55 [quote on p. 55]; in German translation,
pp. 53-61.
14. The Novices if Sais, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Curt Valentin, 1949), p. 113. Original:
Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in Schriften, ed. P. Kluckhohn and R. Samuel, 2d ed. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer,
1960-1975), vol 1, p. 106.
15. Hermann Cohen, Introduction to F. A. Lange's Geschichte des Materialismus (with a critical
postscript to the ninth edition, 1914), in Hermann Cohen, Schriften zur Philosophie und Zeitgeschichte
(Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1928), vol. 2, pp. 197 -198. With regard to the problem of differentiating
myth from science, Cohen took the easy way out. "That is the difference between myth and
science: that science deals with matter, where myth saw consciousness": Das Prinzip der Infin-
itesimaLmethode und seine Geschichte. Ein KapiteL z.ur Grundlegung der Erkenntniskritik (Berlin, 1883;
2d ed., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1968), p. 229.
641
16. The culture-circle concept was constructed by Leo Frobenius in 1897 but later given up
again. Its implications of diffusion and overlapping go back to Friedrich Ratzel's Viilkerkunde
(Leipzig, 1886-1888). Fritz Graebner picked up the culture concept again in 1911 in his Methode
der Ethnologie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 191 I). The potential for speculation that is inherent in
an ideal-typical form of theory that proceeds without attention to what can be documented
is something that W. Schmidt and W. Koppers began to exploit in 1924 in their prelude to a
universal history of mankind: VO"lker und Kulturen (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1924). (Only volume I
appeared.)
17. Voltaire, La Princesse de Babylon XI: "Tout ce qu'on savait, c'est que la ville et l'etoile etaient
fort anciennes, est c'est tout ce qu'on peut savoir de l'origine des choses, de quelque natures
qu'elles puissent etre." Voltaire regarded Aesop's fables, too, as myths, whose origin is lost
in an antiquity "whose depths cannot be plumbed": Le Philosophe Ignorant (1766), sec. 47.
18. S. Freud, The Origins if Psychoanalysis, ed. M. Bonaparte, A. Freud, and E. Kris (New York:
Basic Books, 1954), p. 253 (henceforth cited as The Origins if Psychoanalysis). Original: Aus den
Ariflingen der Psychoanalyse. Briefe an Wilhelm Fliess ... (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1962), p. 217 (henceforth
cited as Aus den Anfiingen der Psychoanalyse). Compare The Interpretation if Dreams (I 900-1901),
in The Complete Psychological Works if Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953- ), vol. 5,
pp. 463ff. (henceforth cited as Freud, Complete Psychological Works). Original: Gesammelte Werke
(London and Frankfurt: Imago/S. Fischer, 1940- ), vol. 2/3, pp. 466ff. (henceforth cited as
Gesammelte Werke).
19. Freud to Fliess, Vienna, December 12, 1897, in The Origins if Psychoanalysis, p. 237; Aus den
Ariflingen der Psychoanalyse, p. 204.
20. "Entwurf einer Psychologie" (I 895), in Aus den Anfiingen der Psychoanalyse, pp. 305-384;
"Project for a Scientific Psychology," in The Origins if Psychoanalysis, pp. 347-445.
21. M. Schur, Sigmund Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972),
p. 487.
Chapter 3
I. Horn if Oberon: jean

Paul Richter's {(School Jor Aesthetics," trans. Margaret R... Hale (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1973), pp. 48 and 57-58. Original: Vorschule der Asthetik I 4 s.17;
I 5 s.21.
2. Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Ernest Behler and Roman StnlC (University Park
and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 58. Original: Gespra:ch uber die Poesie,
in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (Munich: F. Schoningh, 1958- ), vol. 2, p. 290.
3. Schlegel, "Talk on Mythology," in Dialogue on Poetry, p. 82; Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe,
vol. 2, p. 313.
4. Friedrich Schlegel, Prosaische jugendschriften, ed. J. Minor (Vienna, 1882), vol. I, p. 237.
5. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy o/Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, The Phenomenolog)l if Knowledge, trans. Ralph
Manheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 90. Original: Philosophic der
s)lmbolischen Fo rm en , second ed. (Dannstadt: Wisscnschaftlichc Buchgcsellschaft, 1954), \'01. 3,
p. 106. Q}loting J. Spieth, Die Religion der Eweer in Sud-Togo (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 191 I), pp. 7-8.
6. W. Marg's comments on his translation of Hesiod's TheogOll)l, in Hesiod: Siimtliche Gedichte

(Zurich: Artemis, 1970), p. 155.
642
7. E. Rothacker, Philosophische A nthropologie (Bonn: H. Bouvier, 1964), pp. 95-96.
8. Goethe, Italian journey, trans. W. H. Auden and E. Mayer {New York: Pantheon, 1962),
p. 500. Original in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, ed. E. Beutler {Munich: Artemis, 1949- ), vol.
11, p. 281 {henceforth cited as Werke, ed. Beutler}.
9. Karl August Bottiger, Literarische Zustande und Zeitgenossen (Leipzig, 1838; rptd. Frankfurt:
Athenaum, 1972), vol. 1, pp. 42-46.
10. Goethe, Kampagne in Frankreich 1792, "Munster, November 1792"; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
12, pp. 418-420.
11. Goethe, Italian journey, p. 500 (translation slightly revised). Original: "Aus den Papieren
zur Italienischen Reise," Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 962-966.
12. G. Simmel, The Philosophy if Money, trans. T. Bottomore and D. Frisby (London, Henley
and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 67. Original: Die Philosophie des Geldes, 3d ed.
(Munich: Duncker und Humblot, 1920), p. 13.
13. Seneca, De Constantia Sapientis 2.
14. P. Hadot, "Le My the de Narcisse et son interpretation par Plotin," Nouvelle Revue de
Psychanalyse 13 (1976): 81-108.
15. Plotinus, Enneads I 6, 8, trans. S. MacKenna (London: Faber & Faber, 1956). On Odysseus
as typifYing the metaphysical home-comer in Neo-Platonism: W. Beierwaltes, "Das Problem
a
der Erkenntnis bei Proklos," in De jamblique Proclus, Entretiens sur l'Antiquite Classique 21
(Vandoeuvres: Fondation Hardt, 1975), p. 161 n.2.
16. W. Brocker, Platonismus ohne Sokrates (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1966), p. 23.
17. H. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy if the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp.
338-341. Original: Die Legitimitat der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 333-336, and
Der Prozess der theoretischen Neugierde, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 24 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1973) (the revised edition of part 3 of Die Legitimitat), pp. 138-142.
18. K. A. Bottiger (cited in note 9), vol. 1, pp. 73-75.
19. Letter to Carlo Linati, September 21, 1920, in Letters ifjames joyce, ed. Stuart Gilbert (New
York: Viking Press, 1957), pp. 146-147 (henceforth cited as Letters, vol. 1).
20. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, July 20, 1919, in Letters, vol. 1. p. 204.
21. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, Febnlary 25, 1919, in Letters if james joyce, vol. 2, ed.
R. EHmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 437.
22. Letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, December 6, 1921, in Letters, vol. 1, p. 178.
23. W. Isel-, "Der Archetyp als Leerform. Erzahlschablonen und Kommunikation in Joyce's
Ulysses," in Terror und Speil, Poetik und Henneneutik 4 (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 369-408; idem,
"Patterns of Communication in Joyce's Ulysses," in The Implied Reader (Baltimore and London:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Original: Der implizite Leser (Munich: W. Fink, 1972).
Whatever Joyce's "implied reader" may have been, in one explicit case Joyce's anticipations
vI/ere frustrated: His wife Nora did not read the book, although that seems to have been an
almost erotic experimentum crucis for him: "0 my deal-est, if you would only tum to me even
now and read that terrible book .... " [Letter dated April 1922, in Letters ifjames jo)'ce, vol. 3,
643
ed. R. Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1966), p. 63]. "If Ulysses isn't fit to read ... life isn't fit to
live" was joyce's reply to the report that his Aunt josephine had said that the book was not
fit to read. Quoted by R. Ellmann, james joyce (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p.
551.
24. A Portrait if the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking, 1964), p. 215.
25. Quoted by J. Gross, joyce (London: Fontana/Collins, 1971), p. 29.
26. H. Deku, "Selbstbestrafung," ArchivforBegriffsgeschichte 21 (1977): 42-58. On the Oedipus

model of the self-discovery of previously unknown guilt in the medieval legend of judas,
Gregorius, and Albanus, see F. Ohly, Der Verfluchte und der Erwahlte. Yom Leben mit der Schuld
(Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1976). The story of judas's life, especially, 'explains,' on the
basis of the apostle's early Oedipus-type history, how he could (if he didn't in fact have to)
become the biblical betrayer of jesus, although he had been chosen as "the penitent."
27. Freud, "The Uncanny," in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 17, p. 237; Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 12, p. 249.
28. Freud, Three Essays on the Theory if Sexuality (1905), in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 7,
p. 226n; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 5, p. 127.
29. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 15, 1897, in The Origins if Psychoanalysis, pp. 223-224; Aus
den A nfiingen der Psychoanalyse, p. 193. At the end of the letter Freud applies the discovery to
Hamlet, which also has the fundamental cyclical pattern of a perpetrator who seeks his own
punishment. On this, see Karl Abraham, Dreams and Myths (New York: journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease Publishing Co., 1913). Original: Traum und My thus (1909), in Psychoanal),tische
Studien (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969), pp. 261-323. Freud encountered the Oedipus material early
on, as we know from his "Autobiographical Study" of 1925; in his Abitur [examination on
graduating from the Gymnasium] he was given thirty-three verses from Sophocles's Oedipus
Rex to translate, and he had already read the play on his own.
30. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure PrinCiple, in Complete Psychological Works, vol. 18, p. 38 [quotations
in t he next four paragraphs for which no source is given are from this and the following pagel;
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 13, pp. 40-41. Claude Bernard, who made physiology central to biology,
summarized the views advanced in his Dijinition de la vie (1875) in the paradox, "La vie, c'est
la n10rt"-here also already recognizing the equivalence of the great myth of the Minotaur:
"La vie est un minotaure elle devore l'organisme." La science expirimentale, 7th ed. (Pal;s:
Bailliere, 1925).
31. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels und W. Kranz (Berlin: Weidmann, 1934-1954),
22 B 36 and 77. Commentary in W. Brocker, Die Geschichte der Philosophie vor Sokrates (Frankfurt:
Klostermann, 1965), p. 39.
32. Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Complete Psychologiral Works, vol. 17,
p. 54; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, p. 131.
33. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure PrinCiple, in Complete Psychological ~Vorks, vol. 18, p. 38: Gesammelte
Werke, vol. 13, p. 40.
34. P. Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story if Freud and Tausk (New York: Knopf, 1969), p. 127.
Freud's student, Hans Sachs, reports Freud's reaction to the news of a suicide-perhaps it was
that of the death ofTausk-"I saw him [Freud! when t he news came t hat someone with whom
he had been on fi-iendly terms for years had committed suicide. I found him sll-;lI1gdy unmoved
by sllch a tragic event": ibid., p. 141. Roazcn also tells of the dose association in time between
the death of Tallsk and the writing of Be)'ond the Pleasure Prinnple: Freud, he says, gave the
manllscript to friends as eady as September 1919.
644
35. H. U. Instinsky, Das Jahr der Geburt Jesu. Eine geisteswissenschoftliche Studie (Munich: Kosel,
1957).
36. Eusebius, Historia ecclesiastica I 5, 2-4. Commentary in E. Peterson, "Der Monotheismus als
politisches Problem" (1935), in Theologische Traktate (Munich: Kosel, 1951), pp. 86ff
37. R. Hennig, "Die Gleichzeitigkeitsfabel. Eine wichtige psychologische Fehlerquelle," Zeitschrijt

for Psychologie 151 (1942): 289-302.
38. A. Demandt, "Verformungstendenzen in der Uberlieferung antiker Sonnen- und Mond-

fmstemisse," Abhandlungen der Akademie z.u Mainz. (Geistes- und sozialwiss. Kl.), 1970, no. 7.
Also, M. Kudleck and E. H. Mickler, Solar and Lunar Eclipses if the Ancient Near East from 3000
B.C. to 0 with Maps, Alter Orient and Altes Testament, Sonderreihe 1, 1971 (Kevalaer: Butzon
& Bercker, 1971).
39. B. Fontenelle, L'Histoire des Oracles, ed. L. Maigron (Paris: Comely, 1908): "II y a je ne scay
quoy de si hereux dans cette pensee, que je ne m' etonne pas qu' elle ait eu beaucoup de
cours .... "
40. R. Musil, Tagebiicher, ed. A. Frise (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), vol. 1, p. 754.
41. Oehlenschlager to Goethe, September 4, 1808, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. K. R. Mandelkow

(Hamburg: Wegner, 1965-1969), vol. 1, p. 547.
42. J. G. Droysen, Grundriss der Historik, sec. 45, in Droysen, Historik, ed. R. Hubner (Munich
and Berlin: Oldenbourg, 1937), p. 345.
43. W. Rathenau, Briefe (Dresden: Reissner, 1926), vol. 2, p. 348.
44. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper &
Row, 1962), p. 120. Original: Sein und Zeit, sec. 18, 7th ed. (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1953), p. 87.
Chapter 4
1. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, ZukunJtsphilologie! Zweites Stuck. Eine Erwiderung (Berlin,

1873), p. 9. Reprinted in K. Grunder (ed.), Der Streit um Nietz.sches ({Geburt der TragiJ'die" (Hildesheim:
G. Olms, 1969), p. 120.
2. "Catalogues of Women and Eoiae," in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, trans. H. G.
Evelyn- White, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), pp.
199-201. [Translation slightly revised, following the author's authority: W. Marg, Hesiod: Samtliche
Gedichte (Zurich: Artemis, 1970), p. 491.] The "Catalogues of Women" must be seen as closely
related to the Iliad, but there is no hint there of the shared oath of Helen's suitors as the
motive for the expedition.
3. The material on Phobus and Deimus has been collected by S. Jikel in A rchivfor Begriffsgeschichte
16 (1972): 141-165.
4. R. Bilz, "Der Vagus-Tod," in Die unbewaltigte Vergangenheit des Menschengeschlechts (Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1967), p. 244. Later: R. Bilz, Palaoanthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), pp.
418-425,442-447.
5. R. Merz, Die numinose Mischgestalt. Methodenkritische Untersuchungen z.u tiermenschlichen Erscheinungen

A ltagyptens, der Eisuit und der A randa in Australien, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vor-
arbeiten 36 (Berlin: DeGruyter, 1978).
645
6. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy ifSymbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953-1957),
vol. 2, p. 195. Original: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (Berlin, 1923-1929; 2d ed., Dannstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1953), vol. 2, pp. 233-234.
7. J. Bemays, Grundzuge der verlorenen A bhandlung des A ristoteles uber Wirkung der TragO'die (Breslau,
1857; rptd. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1970). On the role of the observer as prototypical for theory,
see B. Snell, The Discovery if the Mind: The Greek Origins if European Thought (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1953), p. 4. Original: Die Entdeckung des Geistes. Studien zur Entstehung
europaischen Denkens bei den Griechen (Hamburg: Claassen & Gowerts, 1946), p. 18. Theorein was
not originally a verb, but derived from the noun, theoros; "its basic meaning is 'to be a spectator.' "
Distance as an aesthetic category was comprehensively discussed in the third volume of the
Poetik und Hermeneutik series: Die nicht mehr schiinen Kunste, ed. H. R. Jauss (Munich: Fink,
1968).
8. H. Blumenberg, SchijJbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigma einer Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp taschenbuch

wissenschaft 289 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 28-31.
9. Herodotus, Histories VIII 55.
10. Iliad XXI 385-390; The Iliad if Homer, trans. Ennis Rees (New York: Random House, 1963),
p.435.
II. Jean Paul, Vorschule der A~thetik III 3; Horn if Oberon: Jean Paul Richter's "School for Aesthetics,"
trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 307.
12. Plato, Republic III 3; 388 E; The Republic if Plato, trans. F. M. Comford (New York and
London: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 78: "Again, our Guardians ought not to be overmuch
given to laughter. Violent laughter tends to provoke an equally violent reaction (metabole) . ...
still less should Homer speak of the gods giving way to 'unquenchable laughter.' ... "
13.]. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke (Berlin: Rutten und Loening,
1955- ), vol. 6, p. 112 (henceforth cited as Griechische KuLturgeschichte).
14. Leiden Papyrus]. 395, quoted from H. Schwabl, "Weltschopfung," in Paulys Realencyklopadie
der classischen Altertumswissenschojt (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1958), pp. 126-127.
15. H. Jonas, Gnosis und spiitantiker Geist, vol. I (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1934),
p. 370.
16. Empedocles fr. B. 115, in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. H. Diels and W. Kranz (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1934-1954), vol. I, pp. 357-358.
17. H. Diller and F. Schalk, "Studien zur Periodisierung," Abhandlungen deT Akademie z.u Maim.
(Geistes- und sozialwiss. Kl.), 1972, no. 4, p. 6.
18. O. Liebmann, Die KLimax deT Theorien (Strassburg, 1884), pp. 28-30.
19. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York: Pantheon, 196 I), p. 340; Erillnenmgm,
Traume, Gedanken (Zurich: Rascher, 1962), p. 343.
20. U. von Wilamowitz-Mocllcndorff, Der Glaube deT IleLLenen (I 931-1932; 2d cd., Berlin: Akademic
Verlag, 1955), vol. I, p. 18 (henceforth cited as Der Glaube der HeLLenen).
21. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy if" SymboliC Forms, vol. 2, p. 48; Philosophie deT symbolischen FOTmen,
2d cd., vol. 2, pp. 62-63.
646
22. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, ed. A. Hiibscher (Frankfurt: W. Kramer, 1966- ),

vol. 1, p. 151.
23. Hans Jonas, "Neue Texte zur Gnosis," supplement to the third edition of his Gnosis und
spatantiker Geist (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 385-390.
24. Odyssey IV 351-586, from the translation by W. Shew ring (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1980), pp. 44-45, revised to follow the translation by W. Schadewalt (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958),
used by the author.
25. Benjamin Hederich, Griindliches Mythologisches Lexikon (I 724; 2d ed., 1770; rptd. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), col. 2110.
26. Ovid, Metamorphoses Vl11 731-737.
27. Hesiod, fragment 209, following W. Marg's commentary in his Hesiod (Zurich: Artemis,
1970), pp. 522-523. This fragment is also in Hesiod, Homeric Hymns, and Homerica, p. 185.
28. A. Gehlen, Urmensch und Spatkultur (Bonn: Athenaum, 1956), p. 275.
29. F. Dirlmeier, "Die Vogelgestalt homerischer Gotter," Abhandlungen der Akademie zu Heidelberg
(Phil. -hist. Kl.), 1967, no. 2.
30. Wilamowitz, Der Glaube der Hellenen, vol. 1, p. 141.
31. Ibid., p. 22.
32. Iliad XIll 68-72.
33. o. Goldberg, Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer. Einleitung in das System des Pentateuch (Berlin: David,
1925), pp. 280-282.
34. Exodus 32: 19.
35. Max Weber, Ancient judaism (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1952), p. 137: "A further important
peculiarity arises from the quality of the god as guardian of the confederate law and as war
god accepted through a special contract: the god was and continued to be, in spite of all
anthropomorphism, unmarried and, hence, childless .... With Yahwe, however, this circumstance
from the beginning contributed substantially to his appearance as something unique and more
removed from this world, in contrast to the other divine figures. This, above all, blocked the
formation of true myths, which is always 'theogony.' " Original: Gesammelte AtifSatze zur Reli-
gionssoziologie, vol. 3, Das antikejudentum (Tiibingen: MohrlSiebeck, 192 I), p. 148. Thomas Mann
made use of this passage-like the other that describes Yahwe's lack of a theogony as an
"accomplishment typical of priests" (Ancient judaism, p. 226; Das antike judentum, p. 24 I)-in
composing his joseph, as a means of bringing out the contrast to the freedom of myth. See
H. Lehnert, "Thomas Manns Josephstudien 1927-1939," jahrbuch der SchillergeselLschift 10 (I 966):
512-513.
36. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte 111 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p. 114.
37. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p. 119.
38. Kierkegaard, On the Concept if Irony with Constant Riference to Socrates, trans. L. M. Capel
(Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1965), p. 103n.
647
Part II
Chapter 1
I. Schelling, EinLeitung in die PhiLosophie der MythoLogie, in SammtLiche Werke (Stuttgart and Augsburg,
1856; rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957), vol. I, p. 482.
2. According to E. B. Tylor, Primitive CuLture (I 871; rptd. New York: Harper, 1958), vol. I, p.
16, "survivals are processes, customs, opinions and so forth, which have been carried on by
force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original
home .... " On the concept, see J. Stagl, KuLturanthropoLogie und GeseLLschoJt (Munich: List, 1974),
p. 41.
3. Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, October 15, 1897, in The Origins if PsychoanaLysis, pp. 223-224; Aus
den Anfongen der PsychoanaLyse, p. 193. This passage was already quoted in context, in relation
to the production of 'significance,' in part 1, chapter 3, text related to note 29.
4. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones II 10, 5: "De hac hominis fictione poetae quoque, quam vis
corrupte, tamen non aliter tradiderunt. Namque, hominem de luto a Prometheo factum esse,
dixenmt. Res eos non fefellit, sed nomen artificis."
5. Ibid. II 10, 6: "Nullas enim litteras veritatis attigerant ... veritas a vulgo solet veriis sennonibus
dissipata corrumpi, nullo non addente aliquid ad id, quod audierant, carminibus suis
comprehendenmt. "
6. Tacitus, Germania 2, 2: "Celebrant carminibus antiquis, quod unum apud illos memoriae et
annalium genus est, Tuistonem deum terra editum et filium Mannum originem gentis
conditoresque .... "
7. Wilhelm Grimm to Goethe, Cassel, June 18, 1811, in Briife an Goethe, ed. K. R. Mandelkow
(Hamburg: Wegner, 1965-1969), vol. 2, p. 88.
8. Odyssey XI 373-376; The Odyssey if Homer, trans. Ennis Rees (New York: Random House.
1960), p. 185.
9. Odyssey XXIII 306-309, Rees, p. 388.
10. Johann Heinrich Voss to his wife Ernestine, Weimar, June 5, 1794, in Briife, ed. Abraham
Voss (Halberstadt, 1829-1832), vol. 2, pp. 382-383.
I I. Voss to his wife, Weimar, June 6, 1794, in Briife, vol. 2, pp. 386-387. Goethe's library
contained only the second (1802) and the fourth (1804) edition of Voss's Homer.
12. Voss to Friedrich August Wolf, Eutin, November 17, 1795, in Briife, vol. 2, pp. 229-230.
13. Voss to his brother-in-law, Heinrich Christian Boie. October 8, 1779, in Briife, vol. 3, pt. I.
pp. 145-146.
14. Voss to his son, Heinrich Christian, March 1780, in Briife, vol. 3, pt. 1. pp. 147-148.
15. Voss to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Elllin, September 26, 1791. in Bridf. vol. 2. j>p.
297-298.
16. W. Schadewalt, f)ie Leger/de von /-Iomer, dem Iahrenden Slinger. Ein aLtgrierhisrhes l'oLk.\burh
(Leipzig: Kohler und Amclang, 1942), pp. 16, 20. and 44. lQ!.lotations in this and the next
648
paragraph. The corresponding pages in the Artemis edition (Zurich and Stuttgart, 1959) are
12, 15, and 33.) "How potent was fame in those days!" the translator exclaims in his commentary,
where he is explaining the mode of existence of these bards, and continues: "These singers
and rhapsodists ... sang, in the regular and prescribed manner, material trom the store of
songs and epics that passed trom master to student down through the generations." The great
lords and kings, he says, provided themselves with resident rhapsodists, and communities
'called' them trom abroad, "as was done only with the respected professions: seers, doctors,
and master builders": Schadewalt, Die Legende, p. 53; Artemis edition, p. 40.
17. Even if Nietzsche's ascription of the "Contest between Homer and Hesiod" to Sophism,
in the person of Alcidamas, the student of Gorgias-GesammeLte Werke (Munich: Musarion,
1920-), vol. 2, pp. 160-181-should not be correct, it remains a stroke of brilliance that is
instructive in relation to the young (I 871) philologian's future view of the world. This is
especially the case because the Greeks' dictum, containing the tenor of tragedy, that for mortals
it would be better not to be born [Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, 1211; see H. Blumenberg, Die
Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 16-17] plays a role in the agon
[contest] as Homer's answer to a question set for him by Hesiod {see Schadewalt, Die Legende,
p. 46)-and may have been the deciding factor, when one considers how little that sort .of
thing may have seemed to the king of Aulis to suit the festive surroundings. But wouldn't this
dictum be enough to make the whole appear heterogeneous to the sphere of the Homeric
materials? Seen trom the perspective of myth, the dictum agrees with Zeus's judgment that
the creature called "man" does not deserve to live; but it passes over Prometheus's opposition
to this verdict, an opposition that triumphs in the end. ~ut it would fit Gorgias's nihilism-
"Nothing exists, and if anything did exist ... "-like a school example. But could Homer, as
the patriarch of Sophism and its arts of extemporizing, then be allowed to be the loser? Or
would that be a final sneer at the victor's homely commonplaceness, which pleased a king
but not his audience? That would have had to be the way the student of Gorgias meant it, if
indeed he was the one who said it.
18. E. Cassirer, The Philosophy if Symbolic Forms (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1953-1957), vol. 2, p. 105. Original: Philosophie der symbolische1l Formen (Berlin, 1923-1929; 2d.
ed., Dannstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1953), vol. 2, pp.
130-131.
19. Ernst Junger's nice formula that prehistory is always the history that hits closest to home
[uns am nachsten liegt], and that its tendency is "to represent life in its timeless meaning"-
Garten und Strassen (Berlin: Mittler, 1942), pp. 78-79 Uanuary 14, 1940]-is also based on the
unnoticed confusion between not being affected by time and being timeless. We possess stories
that we take for prehistory, but we don't possess any part of prehistory itself; and these stories
are neither close to us nor distant in any way that can be compared to historical material.
The former cannot be played off against the latter in any antithesis, because what remains of
those stories is itself, in datable items of testimony, a constituent part of history: as work on
myth.
20. E. Cassirer, The Logic if the Humanities (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University
Press, 1960), p. 94. Original: Zur Logik der K ulturwisse7lschojten. Furif Studien (Goteborg, 1942;
2d. ed., Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), p. 40.
21. The irony contained in the title of Cassirer's last work, The Myth if the State (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1946), is not without bitterness.
22. The reception aspect is also missing from Cassirer's important refinements of the myth
volume of the Philosophy if SymboliC Forms (which first appeared in 1923): Language and Myth
(New York: Harper, 1946). Original: Sprache und Mythos. Ein Beitrag z.um Problem der GiiUernamen,
Studien der Bibliothek Warburg 6 (Leipzig, 1925). A second edition appeared in his Wesen u1ld
Wirkung des SymbolbegrijJs (Dannstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956).
649
23. Reflexionen no. 932, Kants gesammelte Schrijten (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften,
1900-1942), vol. 15, pt. 1, p. 413.
24. H. R. jauss, Alteritat und Modernitat der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich: Fink, 1977), p. 17.
His first discussion of this subject was in his Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Tierdichtung
(Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1959).
Chapter 2
1. H. Blumenberg, Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie (Bonn: Bouvier, 1960), pp. 85-87; rptd.
from A rchiv for Begriffigeschichte 6 (1960).
2. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Basic Writings q/Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random
House, 1966), p. 767. Original in Gesammelte Werke (Munich: Musarion, 1920-), vol. 21, p.
264. Did the editor really read correctly, when Ecce Homo was first published (by Insel Verlag
in 1908), putting "on every seventh day" ["anjedem siebenten Tag"], which admittedly sounds
more philosophically pretentious than "on that seventh day" ["an jenem siebenten Tag"], though
that is all that is in question here? [Kaufmann's translation assumes such an amendment.]
3. I find Max Kommerell's poem "Sagt jemand: ein Nu ... " in Hans-Georg Gadamer's Phi-
losophische Lehrjahre (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1977), p. 104. Untitled, the poem is the first item
in the volume of selections entitled Riickkehr zum A nfang (Frankfurt: Klostennann, 1956). The
extent to which the dogmatics of the Incarnation works toward a hitherto unknown realism
can be seen from the way in which Harnack defends Marcion's 'docetism' against consequences
such as were still unknown to the ancient world: Marcion, he says, had to keep his Christ free
of participation in evil matter and from the ignominy of the reproductive process, invented
by the demiurge; Christ could give himself human feelings even without the substance of flesh:
A. von Harnack, Marcion. Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2d ed. (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924), pp.
124- I 25 (henceforth cited as Harnack, Marcion). But this very avoidance of the ignominious
and of a limit of suffering not determined by himself makes dear what the stigmata of the
realism of an incarnation will be-of an incarnation that had to be a forgoing of a 'purity'
undiluted by matter if it was to be 'taken seriously' as a definitive decision in favor of salvation.
The reality that Tertullian had summarized in the fonnula, "satis erat ei (Sc. Christus) conscientia
sua" (De carne 3), simply wasn't sufficient. If Harnack, now, emphasizes the temporal relativity
of the acceptance of docetism as a means of achieving distance from the world god, then he
cannot at the same time justify docetism as an expression of the exemption of the "nova
documenta dei novi" from confonnity to their time: "Docetism at that time [Zeit] was also an
expression of the fact that Christ is not a product of his age [Zeit] and that what is gifted with
genius and is divine does not evolve out of nature." That is sheer 'spirit of the age' [Zeitgeist]
nonsense and betrays by its language alone ("gifted with genius"! "evolve"!) what age we
should then understand as being expressed. One can see by this what the dogmatic defense
of the Incarnation, seen in a long-tenn perspective, 'accomplished'-even if it were only
preparing the formulability of Nietzsche's contradiction.
4. H. jonas, Gnosis und spiitantiker Geist, vol. 2, pt. I, "Von der Mythologie zur mystischen
Philosophie" (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1954), p. l. Signatures 2 through 7 of
the first edition of this part are still printed on the same paper as the fIrst edition (I 934) of
the first volume, whereas the first signature is printed on different postwar paper: evidence
not only of the fortunes of the work but also for dating the methodological introduction on
the "problem of objectifICation and its change of form," from which the definition of "fun-
damental myth" is cited, in immediate proximity to the introductory volume and thus to
jonas's early formulation of the concept of an epoch.
5. Clement of Alexandria, Excerpta ex Theodoto 78.

650
6. H. jonas, Gnosis, vol. 1, p. 261, describes the instructive content of the formula from Theodotus
as follows: "The first two pairs of subjects refer to the downward movement, the last two
pairs refer to the turning back and the movement upward, and their correspondence shows
the soteriological 'conclusiveness' of the whole. The fact that they are, in each case, pairs
reflects the dualistic tension, the polarity and thus the necessary dynamism of the Gnostic
view of existence. In each of the four concept-pairs the succession of the correlated elements
in an event, which the myth has to unfold, is exposed."
7. Harnack, Marcion, pp. 94, 118.
8. G. Delling, "archon [etc.]," in Theological Dictionary if the New Testament, ed. G. Kittel, trans.
G. W. Bromilley (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1964-1976), vol. 1, pp. 478-489. The thesis
that Marcion exaggerated Paul's idea of the "pernicious government of the world by antidivine
angelic and spiritual powers ... into the doctrine of two gods, while the Church's theology
sought to blunt it," can be found in M. Werner's Die Entstehung des christlichen Dogmas, 2d. ed.
(Bern: P. Haupt, 1953), p. 211 n. 60. [This note is omitted from the English translation, The
Formation if Christian Dogma (New York: Harper, 1957), but the corresponding text is on p. 82.]
9. The Formation if Christian Dogma, p. 95: "The appearance of the Heavenly Christ in the
ordinary form of a man signified thus a disguise of his own proper being, by which the angelic
powers were deceived" [or "tricked"; the original text, on p. 238, has "getauscht, iiberlistet
wurden"]' Further citations where Christ is described as disguised are given in The Formation,
p. 97; Die Entstehung, pp. 244-245.
10. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrijt for die vemiiriftigen Verehrer Golles II
3.3 section 16, ed. G. Alexander (Frankfurt: Insel, 1972), vol. 2, p. 247. Similarly, in II 3.2
section 7 (vol. 2, p. 202): "Was that a situation in which he had to conceal himself, live incognito
and travel incognito to heaven so that a,11 of posterity would remain eternally in uncertainty
regarding his Resurrection, or all its faith would be in vain?"
11. Ausgewahlte Schriften der armenischen Kirchenvater, ed. Simon Weber (Munich: Kosel & Pustet,
1927), vol. 1, pp. 152-180. I cite Eznik after Wilhelm Dilthey, "Die Gnosis. Marcion und seine
Schule," in Gesammelte Schr!ften (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914-1982), vol. 15, p. 290. Harnack, Marcion,
p. 171, tells it as follows: The world creator, having fallen into the power of death, himself
proposed to jesus to exchange the faithful for his life. But that won't work, because the faithful
had already been set free, so that it can only have been a question of the 'consequences' of
the fact that the price of their redemption was not adhered to.
12. Harnack, Marcion, pp. 4{'-5\ on Irenaeus, Adversus haereses II, 3,4, and Eusebius, Historia
ecciesiastica IV 14, 7.
13. Foreword to the first edition of Marcion (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1921).
14. Hans jonas, Philosophical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.].: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 285; Gnosis
und spatantiker Geist, 3d ed. (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964), vol. 1, pp. 377-424
("Neue Texte zur Gnosis," supplement dated 1963); W. C. Till, Die gnostischen Schriften des
koptischen Papyrus Berolinensis 8502, 2d ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1972) (henceforth cited as
Berolinensis Gnosticus); M. Krause and P. Labib, Die drei Versionen des Apokr)'flhon des johannes
(Wiesbaden: o. Harrassowitz, 1962) (henceforth cited as Apokryphon desjohannes). [An accessible
English translation of one version-that of Codex II-of the APOCT)'flhon ?J}ohn is in The Nag
Hammadi Library: In English, translated by members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of
the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, james M. Robinson, Director (San Francisco: Harper
& Row, 1977), pp. 99-116. When this translation agrees with Krause and Labib's, I have used
its English, but when they disagree I have followed Krause and Labib, as the author's authority.
Rather than multiplying page references to modem editions, 1 have given only those the author
gives (to Till's Berolinensis Gnosticus and Krause and Labib's Apok1yphon des johannes), inserting
651
in brackets after the codex number the page and line numbers, in the original papyri, of the
passages being cited.] In his description of the text, Walter C. Till gives a sharply defined
example of the popular conception of the relation between question and answer in myth:
"The world picture that is unfolded in the Apocryphon of John is meant to answer two great
questions: How did evil come into the world? And how can man free himself from it? This
formulation of questions is not immediately contained in the text, but it constitutes the unex-
pressed basis on which the world picture is developed": Berolinensis Gnosticus, p. 35.
15. P. Hadot, "Le My the de Narcisse et son interpretation par Plotin," Nouvelle Revue de
Psychanalyse 13 (I 976): 81-108. In the version of Codex II [page 4, lines 19-24] fApokryphon des
johannes, pp. 119-120): "For he is the only one who sees him in his light, which surrounds
him-that is the spring of the water of life. And he produces all the eons and in every fonn.
He knows his image when he sees it in the well of the spirit."
16. Apocryphon 0/john, Codex II [page 11, lines 11-15]; Apokryphon des johannes, p. 140.
17. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 37 to page 39, line 10], pp. 115-119. Ialdabaoth is, 'once again,'
animal-faced, having the typos [mark, figure] of snake and lion. The seven kings of heaven and
five rulers of the underworld (chaos) that emanate from him and are empowered by him are,
in tum, almost exclusively animal-faced: lion, donkey, hyena, snake, dragon, ape; Sabbataios
is a "glowing flame face." Ialdabaoth himself is also capable of changing his fonn (morph"i) at
will: ibid. [page 42, lines 10-13], p. 125, lines 10-13.
18. Apokryphon des johannes, Codex IV [page 19, lines 12-14], p. 215. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page
43, line 8], p. 127: "They arose through his speaking."
19. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 43, line 2, to page 44, line 18], pp. 127-129. The excerpt given
by Irenaeus of·Lyons ends with this occupation of the 'position' of the Old Testament God
by Ialdabaoth.
20. Apocryphon 0/john, Codex II [page 11, line 20]; Apokryphon des johannes, p. 140.
21. Apocryphon o/john, Codex III [page 22, lines 4-15]; Apokryphon desjohannes, pp. 76-77. The
text of the Berolinensis Gnosticus corresponds to this. "Let us create a man according to the
image (eikon) and appearance of God": Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 48, lines 11-14], p. 137. The
variant in Codex II is important in this connection because it connects with the initial light
metaphors and makes man into the source of light for the lower world. The first archon (here:
"Ialtabaoth") speaks to the powers (exousiai) that are with him: "Come, let us create a man
according to the image (eikon) of God and our own image, so that his image (eikon) may become
light for us": I1pokryphon des johannes [page 15, lines 2-4], p. 150. This reference to the light
image is repeated at the 'christening': "Let us call him 'Adam,' so that his name may become
a power of light for us" [page 15, lines 11-13]. In connection with the production of his body,
a catalog is given of the names of the powers that are each responsible for an organ. There
follows, as a further list, that of the 'demons' responsible for organ functions: APokl)phon des
johannes [pages 15-18], pp. 193-199. This litany must have a magical-medical background, but
as a totality it is an anthropology made of names, belonging to a type of thought that does
not want to 'explain,' but merely wants to make sure there is a competence for everything.
The integration is completed by means of a cosmological point when we are told that the
number of those involved in creating man was 365.
22. Apocryplwn oj john, Codex II [page 19, line 21, to page 23, line 9J; I1pokryplzon dfs johanllfS,
pp. 169-173.
23. I1pocr)'pholl 0/jolm, Codex III [page 31, lines 19-211; I1pokryplwll des johamles, p. 92.
24. Apocryphon ojJolm, Codex II [page 23, line 37, to page 24, line 3]; I1pokrypllOn dfs.Johallllf5,
pp. I 74- I 75.
652
25. Berolinensis Gnosticus [page 58], p. 157: The production of anaisthesia [insensibility]' in Gnosticism,
is based, like other material, on the biblical text about the anesthetizing sleep that God causes
to fall on Adam in order to remove from him the rib from which he makes Eve: "And the
Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept.... " The Apocryphon transforms
this insignificant surgical episode into the decisive imposition of the incapacity for knowledge:
" ... he enveloped his senses with a veil and burdened him with inability to know."
26. Apocryphon ifjohn, Codex II [page 28, lines 5-11, and page 23, lines 27 -33]; Apokryphon des
johannes, pp. 174-175 and 188-189. Codex IV does not contain any variants, in relation to
Codex II, that are of comparable importance to the divergences of Codex II from Codex III,
especially not in the biblical allusions from the mouth of Ialdabaoth.
27. Apocryphon ifjohn, Codex II [page 31, lines 3-6]; Apokryphon des johannes, pp. 198-199.
28. Ludwig Feuerbach, "Der Schriftsteller und der Mensch" (I 834), in Samtliche Werke, ed.
w. Bolin and F. JodI (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1960-1964), vol. 1, p. 276.
29. L. Curtius, Deutsche und antike Welt (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1950), pp. 375-376.
30. M. Scheler, Spate Schriften, in Gesammelte Werke (Bern: Francke, 1976), vol. 9, p. 161. Translated
in Max Scheler, Philosophical Perspectives (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), pp. 114-115.
31. Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebiicher, ed. Ludmilla Assing (Leipzig, 1861-1870),
vol. 2, p. 25.
Chapter 3
1. Jacob Bernays to Paul Heyse, March 21, 1853, in jacob Bernays. Ein Lebensbild in Briifen, ed.
Michael Bernays (Breslau: Marcus, 1932), pp. 62-63. See also H. 1. Bach,jacob Bernays (Ttibingen:
Mohr, 1974), pp. 90-91. Monotheism is entirely undramatic, Goethe said to Schopenhauer
(according to the latter's report), "because one can't do anything with one person": Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 22, p. 744.
2. A. G. Kastner, "Des Pluto Helm," in Gesammelte poetische und prosaische schonwissenschafiliche

Werke, vol. 2 (Berlin, 1841), p. 121. Kastner is referring to Bernard de Montfaucon, Antiquite
expliquee (Paris, 1719- ), vol. 1, pt. 2, chap. 9.
3. J. Burckhardt to R. Griininger, Parma, August 28, 1878, in Briife, ed. M. Burckhardt (Basel:
Schwabe, 1949- ), vol. 6, pp. 283, 286. Compare Burckhardt's Cicerone, in Gesammelte Werke,
vol. 10, pp. 305£[
4. Exodus rabba 41,3, in Theological Dictionary if the New Testament, ed. Kittel, vol. 2, p. 374.
5. Thus G. von Rad, "eikon," in Theological Dictionary if the New Testament, ed. Kittel, vol. 2, p.
381.
6. G. Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press,
1950), p. 143 [translation slightly revised]. Original: Rijiexions sur la violence (I 906; Paris: Riviere,
1946), pp. 177-178.
7. M. Kartagener, "Zur Struktur der Hebraischen Sprache," Studium Generale 15 (1962): 31-39;
citations from pp. 35-36.
8. Heine, "Shakespeares Madchen und Frauen" (I838), in Samtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb,
vol. 4, pp. 264-265. Heine, in Venice, looks for clues to Shylock, visiting on the same day the
653
lunatic asylum of San Carlo and the synagogue, which leads him to the 'discovery' that there
was in the gaze of the Jews "the same fatalistic, half-staring and half-restless, half-sly and half-
stupid gleam" as in the gaze of the madmen, which is supposed to testifY to the "supremacy
of a fixed idea": "Has the belief in that extraworldly thunder-god that Moses articulated
become the 'fixed idea' of an entire people ... ?"
9. G. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in judaism (f\!~w York: Schocken, 1971), p. 35. Subsequent
quotations are from the same page. Original in Uber einige Grundbegrijfe desjudentums (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 166-167.
10. Entry for August 5, 1934, in T. Mann, Diaries 1918-1939, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston
(New York: Abrams, 1982), p. 222. Original: Tagebiicher 1933-1934, ed. P. de Mendelssohn
(Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977), p. 497.
11. Thomas Mann to Karl Kerenyi, September 7, 1941, in Mythology and Humanism: The Cor-
respondence if Thomas Mann and Karl Kerinyi, trans. A. Gelley (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1975), p. 103. Original in Gespriich in BrieJen, 2d ed. (Munich: Rhein Verlag,
1967), p. 107. The formula of a combination of myth and psychology is much older, going
back to the beginnings of the joseph series: In a letter to Jakob Horwitz of June 11, 1927, he
says that his purpose is to motivate the renewed actualization of timeless myth psychologically:
BrieJe 1. 1889-1936 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1962), pp. 270-273. [See Letters ifThomas Mann 1889-1955
(New York: Knopf, 1971), p. 159.1 Then in 1934, in the "Voyage with Don Quixote," the defense
of the specific rationality of myth against the fashionable irrational isms that are linked with
that title has become his program. "As a teller of tales 1 have arrived at myth-but 1 would
humanize it, would seek, in my unlimited contempt for the merely sentimentally and willfully
barbaric, a rapprochement between humanity and myth. For I find more hope for the future
of humanity in that than in a one-sided struggle against the spirit, a struggle that is bound
to the moment and seeks to ingratiate itself to its time by zealously trampling on reason and
civilization": Thomas Mann, Essays if Three Decades (New York: Knopf, 1948), pp. 455-456
(translation slightly revised).
12. T. Mann, The Story if a Novel: The Genesis if Doctor Faustus, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston
(New York: Knopf, 1961), p. 55. Original: Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Roman eines Romans
(Amsterdam: Bermann-Fischer, 1949), p. 52.
13. Voltaire, Le Philosophe Ignorant (I 766), question XXIX.
14. Ibid., question XXXII.
15. Ibid., question XLVIII. [The next quotation is from the same 'question.']
16. Ibid., question IL.
17. Voltaire, Remarques sur les Pensies de Pascal (I738; probably partly written as early as 1728),
and Dernieres Remarques (I 778). See J. R. Carre, Rijiexions sur L'A nti-Pascal de Voltaire (Paris: Alcan,
1935). Regarding the importance of Voltaire's critique of Pascal, I quote only Jean Paul's
"Komischer Anhang wm Titan," where he says that Voltaire "criticized Pascal in a way that
is and will forever remain the model for all critiques of works of genius."
18. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte Ill, 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p. 29.
19. H. Blumenberg, "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und Wirkungspotential des Mythos," in Tn-ror und

Spiel, ed. M. Fuhrmann, Poetik und Hermeneutik 4 (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 11-66.
20. Hesiod, Tlzeogony 940-943. See W. Marg's commentary in Hesiod: S;hlltliche Gedichte (Zurich:
Artemis, 1970), pp. 291-292.
654
21. Ovid, Metamorphoses III 253-290. Hederich, Goethe's counselor on mythical subjects, for-
mulated the story cautiously. "But he had scarcely appeared with the lightning bolt when
Semele was so terrified that she entered labor prematurely with Bacchus and, when everything
around them began to bum, actually lost her life": GriindLiches MythoLogisches Lexikon, 2d ed.
(Leipzig, 1770; rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967), cols. 2184-2186. I
have harmonized the differences between the Greek and Latin names, except in quotations,
so as not to make the discussion confusing.
22. G. von Rad and G. Kittel, "doxa," in TheoLogicaL Dictionary if the New Testament, vol. 2, pp.
235-258: The rendering of the Hebrew chabod by the Greek doxa "initiated a linguistic change
of far-reaching significance, redefining the Greek term in the most radical manner imaginable"
(p. 245 [translation revised]). The author sees the change in the fact that the term for subjective
opinion becomes that of the "absolutely objective, i.e., the reality of God." A longer-range
examination, extending as far as gLoria, will probably have to see it the other way around.
23. Codex Theodosianus XVI, 1-2, quoted in Harnack, Marcion, pp. 366"-367". But in Decree
XVI, 5, of A.D. 412, the heretics' groups of adherents are still designated as "ecclesiae."
24. H. Denzinger and J. Umberg, Enchiridion SymboLorum (Freiburg: Herder, 1922), no. 225:
Second Council of Constantinople, A.D. 553.
25. M. Elze, "Der Begriff des Dogmas in der Alten Kirche," Zeitschrijt for TheoLogie und Kirche
61 (1964): 421-438.
26. Nietzsche, "Vorarbeiten zu einer Schrift tiber den Philosophen" (1872), in Werke (Musarion
ed.), vol. 6, p. 31.
27. Burckhardt, Griechische KuLturgeschichte III, 2; GesammeLte Werke, vol. 6, pp. 31-33.
28. Burckhardt, Griechische KuLturgeschichte I, 1; GesammeLte Werke, vol. 5, p. 30.
29. Burckhardt, Griechische KuLturgeschichte III, 2; GesammeLte Werke, vol. 6, pp. 44-45.
30. Nietzsche, "Vorarbeiten zu einer Schrift tiber den Philosophen," in Werke (Musarion ed.),
vol. 6, p. 29.
31. William of Ockham, Commentary on the Sentences I q.42 F: "Deus potest facere per plura
quod potest fieri per pauciora." Seen from this point of view, ubiquity is the purest expression
of the dogmatic principle. Ockham considers the question whether God could also execute all
his effects immediately [i.e., without the help of intervening 'secondary causes'] to be rationally
undecidable, that is, a question whose answer is not derivable from the concept of the potentia
absoLuta. On the importance of this principle in excluding a medieval geocentrism, see
H. Blumenberg, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen WeLt (Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1975), pp. 149-199.
32. Franz Rosenzweig to Gertrud Oppenheim, May 30, 191 7, in Briife, ed. E. Rosenzweig
(Berlin: Schocken, 1935), p. 210.
33. Anselm of Canterbury, Cur deus homo Book I, chapter 16, e<;i. F. S. Schmitt (Munich: Kosel,
1956), p. 50.
34. D. Henrich, Der ontoLogische Gottesbeweis. Sein ProbLem und seine Geschichte in der Neuz.eit (Tiibingen:
Mohr, 1960).
35. Anselm, Cur deus homo, "Praefatio": "Ac necesse esse ut hoc fiat de homine propter quod
factus est, sed non nisi pere hominem-deum; atque ex necessitate omnia quae de Christo
credimus fieri oportere." The principle of equivalence that is involved in his doctrine of the
655
"humana restauratio" is explicitly understood as aesthetic symmetry too, as the "inenarrabilis

nostrae redemptionis pulchritudo" (1,3). The marked aesthetic component, in the metaphors
as well, is a constitutive contribution to the defense of the mythical quality of the great model
that Anselm sets against the questions asked by Boso in the dialogue, questions that could be
reduced to the brief formula: Why so circumstantial, when it could also be done simply? Or:
"Quomodo ergo indigebat deus, ut ad vincendum diabolum de caelo descenderet?" (1,6). That
mythical document of the Letter to the Colossians (2: 14), which was nullified by Christ's death,
no longer means the contract transferring the title to man to the diabolus, as something he
gained as a result of Original Sin, but rather God's decree concerning the sinner: "Decretum
enim illud non erat diaboli, sed dei" (1,7). So tersely can Anselm declare his reoccupation of
the fundamental myth.
36. M. Dibelius, "Paulus auf dem Areopag," Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der vVis-
senschoJten (Phil.-hist. Kl.), 1938-1939, no. 2.
37. Tertullian, Adversus Marcionem 1,9; and Ad nationes IJ,9, 3-4: "Sed et Romanonlm deos Varro
trifariam disposuit (in certos), incertos et electos. Tantam vanitatem! Quid enim erat illis cum
incertis, si certos habebant? Nisi si Attico stupore recipere voluerunt: nam et Athenis ara est
incripta: 'ignotis deis.' Colit ergo quis, quod ignorat?" Pausanias records the plural as being
used on altars to unknown gods in the harbor of Phaleron (Graeciae descriptio I 1,4) and in
Olympia (V 14,8), and Minucius Felix in Rome as well (Octavius VI 2). But what is amazing is
that Hieronymus explicitly corrects Acts and suggests that Paul made the change to suit his
own dogmatic needs. "Inscriptio autem arae non ita erat, ut Paulus asseruit 'ignoto deo,' sed
ita: 'Diis Asiae et Europae et Africae, diis ignotis et peregrinis.' Venlm quia Paulus non pluribus
diis indigebat ignotis, sed uno tan tum ignoto deo, singulari verbo usus est": Ad Titum I 12.
On the antiquity of this inscription, see O. Weinreich, De dis ignotis (Halle, 1914), p. 27. On
the text from Tertullian, see M. Haidenthaller (ed. and trans.), Tertullians Zweites Buch 'Ad
nationes' und 'De Testimonio Animae' (Paderborn, 1942).
38. F. Th. Vischer, Ausgewahlte Werke (Berlin: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1918), vol. 3, p. 23. The
quotation is, to a certain extent, typical of nineteenth-century German autobiographical sketches.
39. I have proposed this reading of Paul's Letter to the Romans 5: 12, in Philosophische Rundschau
2 (1955): 129.
40. Hippolytus, Refutatio omnium haeresium Vll, 21, Lines 7-9, in his T¥erhe, vol. 3 (Leipzig:
Hinrichs, 1916), p. 197. [The author cites a version given by W. Volker, Qy.ellen zur Geschichte
der christlichen Gnosis (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1932), p. 47, which differs from this one in unimportant
respects. My translation is based on that in Hippolytus, Refutation if All Heresies, trans. J H.
MacMahon (Edinburgh, 1868), p. 275.]
41. E. Stauffer, "theos," in Theological Dictionary if the New Testament, cd. Kittel, vol. 3, p. 110.
The basis of this idea could be the rabbinical exegesis of the two biblical names for God,
"Elohim" (of which the root El means "power") being interpreted as relating to justice and
"Jahwe" as relating to God's mercy: ibid., p. 90 n. 113.
Chapter 4
1. Fontenelle, L'Origine des Fables (1724), ed. J.

R. CalT{> (Paris: Akan, 1932), p. 35: "La religion
et Ie bon sens nous ont dcsabuses des fables des Grecs; mais alles sc maintienncnt encore
parmis no us par Ie moyen de la poesie ct de la peinturc, aux-quelles il semble qu'elles aicnt
trouve Ie secret de se rendre necessaires." If one v'lanted to designate the date of the most
resolute contradiction of Fontenelle's treatise on the myths. one would have to name, besides
Vico's almost simultaneous Scienza nuova, above all Herder's travel joml1al of 1769: "Altogether
656
one cannot do too much to destroy what is merely fabulous in mythology; in that light, rattled
off as superstition, falsehood, prejudice, it is intolerable. But as poetry, as art, as a people's
mode of thought, as a phenomenon of the human spirit: there it is great, divine, instructive!"
To this, to be sure, we must still add Schiller's opposition to Herder's preference for the Nordic
mythology over the Hellenic, an opposition that points to the "predominance of prose in our
condition, taken as a whole," and demands "strictest separation" for the poetic spirit, and as
a prerequisite for this that "it forms its own world, and remains, with the aid of the Greek
myths, the relative of a distant, foreign and ideal age": Schiller to Herder, November 4, 1795.
2. One who came very close to the idea of 'reoccupation' is J. R. Carre, in La Philosophie de
Fontenelle ou le Sourire de la Raison (Paris: Aican, 1932), p. 674: "Fontenelle a compris que les
prejuges, detruits par la critique, renaissent irresistiblement, si rien ne vient remplir la place,
assurer la fonction vitale, qui etait la leur, en depit de leur stupidite. II s' est donc employe de
son mieux a substituer un equivalent de sa fa(on a toutes les idees qu'il pretendait ruiner."
3. Fontenelle, CHistoire des Oracles (1686), ed. L. Maigron (Paris: Comely, 1908), pp. f-g.
4. Goethe to Riemer, beginning of August 1809, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 566.
5. Schiller to Goethe, October 28, 1794, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. K. R. Mandelkow (Hamburg:
Wegner, 1965-1969), vol. 1, p. 172 [henceforth cited as Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow1. Schiller
adds: "By this logic he could really have declared his divinity, as we recently expected him
to do."
6. Schopenhauer, Handschriftlicher Nachlass, ed. A. Hiibscher (Frankfurt: W. Kramer, 1966- ),

vol. 2, p. 60 [henceforth cited as Handschriftlicher Nachlass1.
7. Ibid., p. 85.
8. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 209.
9. The Diary ifA naiS Nin, 1931-1934, ed. G. Stuhlmann (New York: Swallow Press and Harcourt,
Brace & World, 1966), p. 272.
10. Anthropologie Structurale (Paris: Pion, 1958). In English: Structural Anthropology, trans. C. Jacobson
and B. G. Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 213-215. The fundamental idea that
what is important about myth is neither the construction of an 'original myth' nor a comparison
between myths, but rather the "sum total of the various versions and interpretations" of a
myth, was expI'essed by Kurt von Fritz in his essay, "Pandora, Prometheus, and the Myth of
the Ages," Review if Religion 11 (1946-1947): 227-260 (the quote is from p. 258).
11. Weimarisches Hcftheater (I802), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 14, pp. 66-67.
12. Regeln for den Schauspieler (I803), section 27; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 14, p. 80.
,
13. Michel Butor, Votre Faust, in Les Cahiers du Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Marxistes, no. 62
(1968): (g).
14. A. W. Schlegel to A. Hayward, December 31, 1832. The story is discussed in E. R. Curtius,
"Goethe's Aktenfiihrung," Neue Rundschau (I 95 1): 110-111, where the Sturm und Drang gesture
of the scene is domesticated in the perspective of his later technique of preserving his papers.
15. Lessing im Gesprach, ed. R. Daunicht (Munich: Fink, 1971), no. 623.
16. Ibid., no. 668.

657
17. Heine to Goethe, Weimar, October 1, 1824, in Brieje an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 2,
p.399.
18. Heine to Rudolf Christiani, Gottingen, May 16, 1825, in Brieje, ed. F. Hirth (Mainz: Kupferberg,
1950-1951), vol. 1, p. 210. In the letter to Moses Moser of July 1, 1825, Heine defines the
contrast of Goethe's nature to his own as that of a "man of the world" [Lebemenschl to an
"enthusiast" [Schwarmer]: Brieje, ed. Hirth, vol. 1, pp. 216-217. In 1836, at the end of the first
part of the Romantische Schule, Heine will confess that it was envy that set him against Goethe.
19. Gesprache mit Heine, ed. H. H. Houben (Frankfurt: Rutten & Loening, 1926), pp. 90-91.
20. Ibid., pp. 74-75.
21. Goethe, Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 156.
22. Lessing, Die Erz.iehung des Menschengeschlechts (1 7 7 7-1780), sections 90-100, in Lessing's Theological
Writings, sel. and trans. H. Chadwick (London: A. & c. Black, 1956), pp. 97-98.
23. H. R. Jauss, "Goethes und Valerys 'Faust': Zur Hermeneutik von Frage und Antwort,"
Comparative Literature 28 (1976): 201-232. To Jauss's thesis that the monologue of the garden
scene-with its serial antitheses to the Cogito-is stylized after Descartes's dream, we should
append what Valery wrote to Gide as early as August 25, 1894. "rai relu Le Discours de la
Methode tan tot, c'est bien Ie roman moderne, comme il pourrait etre fait": Andre Gide-Paul
Valery. Correspondance, 1890-1942 (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 213.
24. Schopenhauer, Handschrifllicher Nachlass, vol. 1, p. 479-from 1817.
25. Feuerbach, Todesgedanken, in Samtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. JodI (Stuttgart: Frommann-
Holzboog, 1960-1964), vol. I, pp. 47-48.
26. "Immortality and the Modern Temper" (The Ingersoll Lecture, 1961), Harvard Theological
Review 55 (1962): 1-20; quotations are from pp. 13, 14, 15, and 20 [forms of verbs slightly
altered in the last two cases to fit the new context]. German version in Organ ism us und Freiheit
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973), pp. 331-338.
27. The exchange of letters between Bultmann and Jonas appears in H. Jonas, Zwischen Nichts
und Ewigkeit (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1963), pp. 63-72.
28. Schopenhauer, Handschrifllicher Nachlass, vol. I, p. 440.
29. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, Part IV, section 63, trans. R. B. Haldane and
J.Kemp (London, 189 I), pp. 459-460.
30. "Uber Tod, Unsterblichkeit, Fortdauer. Ein Gesprach mit Siegfried Unseld," in E. Bloch,
Tendenz-Latenz-Utopie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1978), pp. 308-336.
31. Schopenhauer, Handschrifllicher Nachlass, vol. 1, p. 479.
Part III
Chapter 3
1. Tertullian, Apologeticum 18, 2.
2. Lactantius, Diviniae Institutiones II 9, 25.

658
3. Ibid. II 10, 6-7.
4. Ibid.: "Nullas enim literas veritatis attegerant ... ut veritas a vulgo solet variis sermonibus
dissipata corrumpi, nullo non addente aliquid ad id, quod audierat."
5. Ibid.: " ... de diis autem illum non fuisse, poena eius in Caucaso monte dedarat."
6. Divinae Institutiones III, 15.
7. Lactantius, De ira dei 7, 5.
8. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones II 10, 10-11: "Si ergo catadysmus ideo factus est, ut malitia,
quae per nimiam multitudinem increverat, perderetur: quomodo fictor hominis Prometheus
fuit? cuius filium Deucalionem iidem ipsi (Sc. poetae scriptoresque) ob iustitiam solum esse
dicunt servatum."
9. Ibid. II 10, 12: " ... ab eoque natam primo artem et statuas et simulacra fingendi .... "
1O. Lactantius, Epitome Divinarum Institutionum XX 11-12.
11. Ibid. XX 15: "Sic illecti pulchritudine, ac verae maiestatis obliti, insensibilia sen tientes,
irrationabilia rationabiles, exanima viventes colenda sibi ac veneranda duxerunt." The Enlight-
enment produced a counterthesis to this. According to it, the images of the gods led to the
impoverishment of myth's faculty of imagination, since their excessive definiteness made the
god identical with his image: Wieland, Agathodamon (I 799) IV, 4.
12. Giordano Bruno, Cabala del cavallo Pegaseo I; Opere italiane, ed. P. deLagarde (Gottingen,
1888), p. 582.
13. E. Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, trans. M. Domandi (Phil-
adelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963), p. 95. Original: Individuum und Cosmos in der
Philosophie der Renaissance, 2d ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), p. 101.
The passage from Boccaccio, De geneologia deorum IV 4, as given there: "Venlm qui natura
producti sunt rudes et ignari veniunt, immo ni instruantur, lutei agrestes et beluae. Circa quos
secundus Prometheus insurgit, id est doctus homo et eos tanquam lapideos suscipiens quasi
de novo creat, docet et instruit et demonstrationibus suis ex naturalibus hominibus civiles facit
moribus, scientia et virtute insignes, adeo ut liquide p!lteat alios produxisse naturam et alios
reformasse doctrinam." On this passage see A. Buck, "Uber einige Deutungen des Prometheus-
Mythos in der Literature der Renaissance," in Romanica: Festschrift for Gerhard Rohlfs, ed.
H. Lausberg and H. Weinrich (Halle: Niemeyer, 1958), pp. 86-96. Both interpreters overlook
the fact that with his doubled Prometheus, Boccaccio links up with Ovid's double creation of
man, by allegorizing the picking up of stones by Deucalion and Pyrrha after the great flood
as pointing to the second Prometheus. What else could the "eos tan quam lapideos suscipiens"
mean? In Ovid the softening of the stones and their taking on form was also the turning point:
" ... ponere duritiem coepere suumque rigorem / mollirique mora mollitaque ducere formam":
Metamorphoses I 400-403. All that remains of this origin is "inde genus durum sumus .... "
14. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte III 2; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, pp. 97 -98.
15. Burckhardt, Griechische Kulturgeschichte V; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, p. 352.
16. Marsilio Ficino, Epistolarium II n. 1: Quaestiones quinque de mente; Opera (Basel, 1576), vol. 1,
p. 678: "Contra naturam ipsam rationemque principii est, ab alio semper principio ad aliud
ascendere sine principio. Contra rationem finis est a fine deinceps in finem descendere sine
fine. "
17. Ficino, In Protagoram Epitome; Opera, vol. 2, p. 1298: "Ab his igitur omnibus Prometheus
rationalis animae gubernator in hominem traiecit artis industriam. Quoniam vero divinum id
659
extitit donum, statim ob ipsam cum superis cognationem, hom veneratus est Deum ante quem
loqueretur, vel artes aliquas exerceret; quippe cum divinum munus ob mirificam eius potentiam
prius erigat in divina, quam porrigat per humana. Prometheum vero ob id munus dolore
affectum, significat daemonicum ipsum curatorem nostrum, in quo et affectus esse possunt,
misericordia quadam erga nos affici, considerantem nos ob ipsum rationis munus ab eo vel
datum, vel potius excitatum, tanto miserabiliorem vitam in terris quam bestias agere, quanto
magis sollicitam atque explebilem ... Paenitet me fecisse hominem."
18. Loc. cit.: "Quod autem traditur Prometheum civilem virtutem saluti hominum penitus
necessariam largiri non potuisse, propterea quod virUlS eiusmodi penes lovem sit, quo Prometheo
non licet ascendere, ea ratione intelligendum est, quia civilis virtu tis officium est non solum
rebus humanis, sed etiam artibus imperare, singulasque cum singulis ordinare, cunctas denique
in communem omnium formam dirigere."
19. Plotinus, Enneads IV 3, 14.
20. Ficino's translation is reprinted in F. Creuzer and G. H. Moser's edition of the Enneads
(Paris: 1855), p. 208: "Ligatus autem est formator ille, quoniam opus suum quodammodo
videtur attingere: sed ejusmodi vinculum fit extrinsecus, et ab Hercule solvitur: quoniam ei
facultas inest, per quam etiam quodammodo sit solutus." Noteworthy is the importance that
the metaphor of touch, which elsewhere belongs to the mystical experience of the highest
One, is given here as a mode of experience directed toward the other extreme side, that of
the hyle [matter].
21. Erasmus, Epistolae, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), vol. I, pp. 268ff
22. Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis sdentiarum III 4; Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and
D. D. Heath (London, 1857 -18 74), vol. I, p. 552 (henceforth cited as Works): "Certe Astronomia
talem offen humano intellectui victimam qualem Prometheus olim, cum fraudem Jovi fecit."
English version: vol. 4, pp. 347-348.
23. Bacon, De dignitate III 4; Works, vol. I, p. 553: "Eae autem ostendunt quomodo haec omnia
ingeniose concinnari et extricari possint, non quomodo vere in natura subsistere; et motus
tan tum apparentes, et machinam ipsorum fictitiam et ad placitum dispositam, non causas ipsas
et veritatem rerum indicant."
24. Bacon, De dignitate V 2; Works, vol. I, p. 618: " ... Prometheum ad ignis invenionem ... casu
in illud incidisse, etque (ut aiunt) furtum Jovi fecisse." A Prometheus of the new Indies, of
America, would have had to discover fire in a different way from that of the European
Prometheus, because flint is not so plentiful there: Cogitata et visa, in Works, vol. 3, p. 614.
25. Bacon, De sapientia veterum XXVI; Works, vol. 6, pp. 668-676.
26. Hobbes, De dve 10, 3-4. A different constnlCtion of the stor)', dominateo. by the figure of
the eagle of concern for the future, appears in Leviathan I 12.
27. J. BnlCker, Kurtze Fragen aus der Philosophischen Historie (Ulm, 1 731-1 736) 1 2 c. 1 q. 4
(paragraphs 227-229).
Chapter 4
1. F. Fellmann, Das Vico-Axiom: Der Mensch macht die Geschichte (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1976),
pr. 53-82.
2. Vico, Scienza Nuova (1744) II I, 2.

660
3. Ibid. II 3, 1.
4. Ibid. II 4, 1.
5. Plu tarch, De capienda ex inimicis utilitate, in M oralia VI, 86 EF; ed. H. Gartner, vol. 1, p. 1 73.
The thesis of the treatise contains a roundabout teleology: Not everything in the world is
friendly to man, but he knows how to make use even of what is unfriendly.
6. Wieland, Sammtliche WerRe (Leipzig, 1857), vol. 19, pp. 203-239.
7. H. Blumenberg, "Der Sturz des Protophilosophen. Zur Komik der reinen Theorie, anhand
einer Rezeptionsgeschichte der Thales-Anekdote," in W. Preisendanz and R. Warning (eds.),
Das Komische, Poetik und Hermeneutik 7 (Munich: Fink, 1976), pp. 11-64.
8. Wieland, Go·ttergesprache XII; Ausgewahlte WerRe, ed. F. Beissner (Munich: Winkler, 1964-1965),
vol. 3, pp. 727-741.
9. Herder, Samtliche WerRe, ed. B. Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913), vol. 28, p. 563.
10. Herder, Der enifesselte Prometheus. Scenen, first published in Adrastea (1802) IV, 1; Samtliche
WerRe, ed. Suphan, vol. 28, pp. 329-368; the divergent draft is on pp. 352ff.
Part IV
Chapter 1
1. 'Josef Haydns Schopfung. Aufgefiihrt an dessen Geburtstage den 31. Marz 1826," in Uber
Kunst und Altertum. Funften Bandes drittes Hift 1826, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 14, pp. 135-136.
2. To Ernst Theodor Langer, January 17, 1769, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 113.
3. To Langer, November 24, 1768, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 108.
4. Georg Forster to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, December 1778, in A. Leitzmann, Georg und
Therese Forster und die Bruder Humboldt (Bonn: Riihrscheid, 1936), pp. 194-195.
5. Briife an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 41.
6. To Jacobi, about the first half of April 1775, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 265.
7. Jacobi to Goethe, December 13, 1785, in Briife an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 89.
8. It was Wieland who used the event as a short example of the historical criticism of attested
events. He was not present when the book was punished, he writes to Sophie La Roche, but
in Weimar he immediately heard so many detailed reports from people who had not been
there either that a few days later when he went for a walk in the forest near the Ettersburg
he was on the lookout for traces of the deed. "I finally caught sight of a booklet bound in
blue paper that was nailed to an oak tree, pretty much as people are accustomed to nail birds
of prey to the great door of a tenant farm or a gentleman's country house. What kind of a
booklet it might be, no one wanted to tell me; they left it to the acuity of my telescope or
my intellect to find it out for myself." Up to this point everything is directed at solid verification
and at confirmation by seeing for oneself. But now Wieland takes a tun1ing that is worthy of
the critical historian and that one may suspect contains one of the Enlightener's side glances
661
at the one document on which his distrust focuses: "If I say, now, that I conjectured that it
was Woldemar's letters, I would say by that as much as nothing, because conjecture in such
matters is nothing; I can say nothing for certain, because I could not see what sort of book
it was." To Sophie La Roche, September 21, 1779, in Aus F. H. jacobis Nachlass. Ungedruckte
Briefe von und an jacobi, ed. R. Zoeppritz (Leipzig, 1889), vol. 2, pp. 175-176.
9. Goethe to Lavater, May 7,1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 587.
10. Jacobi to Goethe, September 15, 1779, in Briefe an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 63.
Johanna Schlosser reports to Jacobi that Goethe told her that "he simply could not bear what
one might call the odor of this book (he knew no other way to express what he meant)." To
Jacobi, October 31, 1779, in Goethe als Persijnlichkeit, ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Muller, 1914-1925),
vol. 1, p. 388. Jacobi's Eduard Allwill (I 77 5), though it grew out of the impression made on
Jacobi by his first encounter with Goethe, had already challenged him by criticizing the Sturm
und Drang cult of genius. Since that time their correspondence had broken off, and it is evident
that Goethe's action, in mishandling Woldemar in the summer of 1779, was not a bolt from
the blue.
11. Lessing, Gesammelte Werke, ed. P. Rilla (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954-1958), vol. 8, p. 649.
12. Ibid., vol. 9, p. 862.
13. Ibid., vol. 8, p. 616.
14. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, February 20, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 570.
15. Lessing im Gesprach, ed. R. Daunicht (Munich: Fink, 1971), pp. 345-346.
16. A us F. H. jacobis Nachlass, ed. Zoeppritz, vol. 1, pp. 66-67.
17. Lessing im Gesprach, ed. Daunicht, p. 543. Dilthey, in his essay on Schleiermacher, in 1859,
already designated the date of the dispute about Lessing's final truth as the "visible point of
departure of a powerful philosophical change," and in doing so alluded once again to the
Enlightenment's metaphor of light. "In the bright day of critical rationalism the shadow of
Spinoza, the great pantheist, began to circulate": Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: Teubner,
1914- ), vol. 15, pp. 22-23.
18. A n die Freunde Lessings (Berlin, 1786), in Heinrich Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften zum Panth-
eismusstreit z.wischen jacobi und Mendelssohn (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1916), p. 285.
19. "Erinnenmgen an HerrnJacobi," an addition to Mendelssohn's letter toJacobi of August I,

I 784, in Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften, pp. 11 7-118.
20. Kastner to Nicolai, October 22, 1786, in A. G. Kastner, Briefe aus seclzs Jalzrz.elmten (Ikrlin:
B. Behr, 1912), pp. 154-155.
21. Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 68 (I 786), second part, in Scholz (ed.), Die I-Iauptsdlriftm, p. LXXXII.
22. F. Stolberg, "Die Dichterlinge," in Deutschrs Museum (Leipzig, 1783), pt. 3, p. 195; Lrssing
im Gespro:ch, cd. Daunicht, p. 542.
23. A n die Frrunde Lessings, in Scholz (ed.), IJir lIauptsdlrijtnl, p. 299.
24. F. H. Jacobi, Werke, cd. F. Roth and F. Koppen (Leipzig, 1812-1825), \'01. 4, pt. 2, p. 215.
25. Jacobi to Goethe, December 28, 1812, in Brie/e an Goethe, cd. Mandclko\\', vol. 2, PI"
131-132.
662
26. Biographische EinuLheiten, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 12, p. 634. But Goethe writes to jacobi's
niece, Auguste jacobi, in 1824, that "around your name ... the most beautiful and most
important memories of my life gather": Werke, voL 21, p. 593.
27. Goethe, Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 22, p. 376.
28. Heinrich Meyer, Goethe. Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Gunther, 1967), p. 531.
29. Voss und StoLberg, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 12, p. 647. johann Heinrich Voss's "Wie ward
Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier?" [How did Fritz Stolberg become an unfree person?] had appeared
in 18 19 in the third issue of Sophroniwn.
30. H. Meyer, Goethe, p. 175.
31. To Zeiter, May 11, 1820, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 21, p. 393. Word of this "poetical work
gone astray" first came from a doctor in Revel [now Tallin, capital of Estonia], Bernhard
Gottlob Wettersrand, in june 1819; the letter had been conveyed by the Berlin Academy
member, Thomas johann Seebeck, to Goethe, who at first only conjectured: "It can only be
two acts-the 'Prometheus' monologue, which through jacobi's impnldence caused such an
uproar, was actually part of this, but cannot be contained in the manuscript that was found
among Lenz's things." To Seebeck, june 5, 1819, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 21, p. 336. When
he writes to Seebeck again he already has the fragment in his hands, but mentions it only
quite incidentally, at the end of the long letter: "The 'Prometheus' makes a sufficiently peculiar
impression; I hardly dare to let it be printed, its sentiments are so modem sans-culottish."
To Seebeck, December 30, 1819, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 21, p. 372. When in 1822, his
secretary, Krauter, reorganizes the Paralipomena-Goethe's tag for material kept under lock
and key-and makes up a "Repertorium uber die Goethesche Repositur" [Index to Goethe's
files], we find noted, among nlbrics such as Occasionals, Politica, Erotica, Priapeia, Invectiven, and
Moralia, also "Prometheus (doppeLt)" [Prometheus (two)]. Goethes Werke (Weimar: H. Bohlau,
1887 -1919), Abtheilung III, II, voL 8, pp. 371-372.
32. Literarische Zustiinde und Zeitgenossen in Schilderungen aus K. A. B(jttigers handschriftLichem NachLass,
ed. K. W. Bottiger(Leipzig, 1838; rptd. Frankfurt: Athenaum, 1972), voL 1, pp. 51 f[ Lichtenberg's
letter to Ramberg is in Schriften und Brieje, ed. W. Promies (Munich: Hanser, 1972- ), voL 4,
pp. 678-680.
33. Goethe to Charlotte von Stein, April 6, 1782, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 18, p. 653.
34. Lichtenberg to Friedrich Heinrich jacobi, Febnlary 6, 1793, in Schriften und Brieje, ed.
Promies, voL 4, pp. 842-843.
35. To jacobi, january 12, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 18, p. 834.
36. To Charlotte von Stein, September 11, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, voL 18, p. 871.
37. To jacobi, September 26, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 875.
38. Scholz (ed.), Die Hauptschriften, Notes, p. 12':'.
39. H. Blumenberg, "Approccio antropologico all'attualita della retorica," IL Verri. Rivista di

Letteratura 35/36 (1971): 49-72; also available as "Anthropologische Annahenmg an die Aktualitat
der Rhetorik," in H. Blumenberg, WirkLichkeiten in denen wir Leben (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1981),
pp. 104-136.
Chapter 2
1. Bettina von Arnim, Goethes BriifwechseL mit einem Kinde (Berlin, 1835). This is not subject to
Bettina's wish-possessed untruthfulness abollt Goethe, which should have reached its zenith
663
in her avowal to Varnhagen: "And he did it! that's just what he did!": Varnhagen von Ense,
entry for July 10, 1857, Tagebiicher, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig: Brockhaus 1861-1905), vol. 13, pp.
418-419. [Translator's note: Bettina was responding to Varnhagen's question about what people
would have thought if Goethe had "responded to a young maiden's passionate affection for
him, had taken advantage of it, had returned her caresses .... "] But Goethe himself did not
emirely trust his mother's delight in inventing stories, either. On October 25, 1810, he writes
to Bettina: "Now you have spent a fine time with my dear mother, you have repeatedly heard
her fairy tales and anecdotes, and you carry and protect everything in your fresh, vivid
memory." In Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 621.
2. To Eckermann, May 2, 1824, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 115.
3. To Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, January 6, 1813, in lVerke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 689. More
familiar is the short formulation in Maxims and Reflections, no. 807. How little one should picture
this as a list of attitudes that exist side by side can be seen from the confession in Dichtung
und Wahrheit [ed. Scheibe, vol. 1, p. 527] that "with my character and my way of thinking,
one tendency always swallowed up and repelled all others."
4. Labores Juveniles: Colloquium Pater et Filius, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 15, pp. 20-27.
5. If my assumption is correct, that the father is giving his authentic recollection of the child's
answer, then the son translated his own dictum: "Cogito mecum et opto, ut iste haud prius,
quam cum mundi ipsius interitu universali de loco suo moveatur." The keystone recurs as a
metaphor, "the keystone to man," in Goethe's communication to Herder of his discovery of
the "os intermaxillare": March 27, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 761.
6. Eckermann, Gesprache mit Goethe, November 13, 1823; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 69-71.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff reports a case of seismic telepathy in his Erinnerungen
1848-1914 (Leipzig: Koehler, n.d.; foreword dated 1915), p. 152: The astronomer Schmidt was
awakened from sleep by extremely gentle vibrations of the earth, which he noted down and
compared with the recorded data.
7. H. Beck, Alexander von Humboldt (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1959-1961), vol. 1, pp. 23-24, 41-42;
vol. 2, pp. 247-248. Ludwig Feuerbach evaluated the outcome of the long dispute, in 1839,
entirely from the perspective of Vulcanism's aesthetic "nobility": "What a shame that we could
not be present at the spectacle; but if we had been there, our sensorium would certainly have
been shocked in an extremely unharmonious and extraordinary manner. Why do you demand
of the image what the original cannot provide?" Christian Kapp und seine Literarischen Leistungen,
in Samtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin and F. JodI (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1960-1964), vol.
2, pp. 153ff.
8. To Charlotte von Stein, November 7, 1780, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 549.
9. Literarische Zusto"nde und Zeitgenossen aus K. A. Biittigers handschrifilichem Nachlass, ed. K. W.

Bottiger (Leipzig, 1838; rptd. FrankfiJrt: Athenaum, 1972), vol. I, p. 22. Bottiger sees the granite
cult merely as a fad, which had arisen from Goethe's renewed interest in the mining in
Ilmenau-one of the "most ridiculous 'genius' periods" in the whole of Sturm und Drang:
"There man was nothing whatever, and stone was everything."
10. Didltung urzd Wahrheit, Book 3, chapter 15, ed. Scheibe, p. 526.
11. In Werther, too, there is an argument that borders closely on Spinoza's perse"['eratio: "No,
Lotte, no-how can I perish, how can you perish; after all, we exist!" But the abstract principle
of rationality docs not stand alone: " 'Perish'! What docs it mean? It is just another word-
an empty sound, without feeling for my heart": Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, p" 373. In the second
version, dating from I 783-1786, this remained unchanged, with the exception of punctuation:
Werke, vol. 4, p. 502.
664
12. To Lavater, june 22, 1781, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 601.
13. To Karl August, November 26, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 815.
14. Brieje an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 107.
15. Des Epimenides Erwachen II, 3; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, p. 468.
16. To Karl von Knebel, October 25, 1788, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 124.
17. Tag- und JahresheJte (1789), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, p. 622.
18. H. Meyer, Goethe. Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Gunther, 1967), p. 330.
19. "Aus meinem Leben. Fragmentarisches," in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p. 623.
20. To Riemer, july 29, 1810, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 597.
21. Der Gross-Cophta (1791), IV, 8; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, p. 650.
22. Tag- und JahresheJte (1793), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, p. 631. On Goethe's shipwreck
metaphors, see H. Blumenberg, Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer. Paradigm a einer Daseinsmetapher, suhrkamp
taschenbuch wissenschaft 289 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 20-21, 47-57.
23. Die natiirliche Tochter V, 7; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 6, pp. 401-402.
24. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book III, chapter 14, ed. Scheibe, p. 505.
25. To Zeiter, December 26, 1806, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 506. Connected with
Epimenides is the more daring self-comparison with Epicurus's gods, again to Zeiter (December
16, 1817, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 21, p. 254): He foresaw and guessed in good time, he says
after the Wartburgfest; "indeed [I foresaw] what everyone might have done if the affair turned
out badly." That justifies his dispassionate attitude: "And that is why I have enveloped myself,
like the Epicurean gods, in a still cloud-may I be able to gather it ever thicker and more
inaccessibly around me."
26. To Zeiter, August 30, 1807, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 525.
27. End of April 1780, Tagebiicher, ed. E. Beutler (Zurich: Artemis, 1964), p. 10 1.
28. To Riemer, February 1, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 481-482.
29. J. janssen, Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg (Freiburg, 1877), vol. 1, pp. 70-71: "Goethe is not
only a genius. he also has a truly good heart, but a horror seized me when on one of the last
days of my stay in Weimar he spoke to me of giant spirits who do not bow down even to
the eternally revealed tnlths." Stolberg demonized Goethe. In 1 780 he published for the first
time the quatrain Goethe had entrusted to his sister Auguste in a letter on july 17, 177 7, and
which since then every educated person has known as beginning: "Alles geben Gotter, die
unendlichen, / ihren Lieblingen ganz ... " ["To those whom they love, the gods who are infinite
give all things wholly ... " in Goethe: Selected Verse, trans. David Luke (Baltimore: Penguin Books,
1964), p. 54). Since the manuscript, which was believed to have been lost, has been rediscovered
in the Yale Library, we know that Stolberg read the present tense into it; the actual text reads:
"Alles gaben Gotter ... " [The gods gave everything): W. Vulpius, inJahrbuch der Goethe-GeselLschoft
29 (1967): 280-281. Goethe is speaking of a mythical, distant time.
30. Klopstock to Goethe, May 8, 1776, in Brieje an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1, p. 58. Goethe
to Klopstock, May 21, 1776, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 325: "So not another word on
665
this subject!" Klopstock to Goethe, May 29, 1776, in Briife an Goethe, ed. Mandelkow, vol. 1,
p. 59: "Your failure to recognize the proof of my friendship has been just as great as that
friendship was."
31. Briifwechsel zwischen Klopstock und den Grajen Christian und Friedrich Leopold zu Stolberg, ed.
J.Behrens (Neumunster: Wachholtz, 1964), pp. 189-190. Stolberg did not go to Weimar, where,
according to Goethe's remark to Auguste Stolberg on August 30, 1776, he "would have jaded
himself with courtliness."
32. Charlotte von Stein to Johann Georg Zimmermann, May 10, 1776, in Goethe als Persiinlichkeit,
ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Muller, 1914-1925), vol. 1, pp. 164-165.
33. To Charlotte von Stein, Torfhaus and Clausthal, December 10 and 11, 177 7, in Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 18, p. 383. To Johann Heinrich Merck, August 5, 1778, in Werke, vol. 18, pp.
399-400. To Charlotte, December 10, 1778, 2 P.M., in Werke, vol. 18, p. 409. On the historical
precedent for and significance of Goethe's ascent of the mountain, see H. Blumenberg, The
Legitimacy if the Modern Age (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 341-342. Original: Die
Legitimitat der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), pp. 336-338, or Der Prozess der theoretischen
Neugierde, suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 24 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), pp. 142-144.
34. To Charlotte von Stein, Ostheim (vor der Rhon), September 21, 1780, in Werke, ed. Beutler,
vol. 18, p. 530. On this, see Meyer, Goethe, p. 263.
35. J. W. L. Gleim, in VVerke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 110-111.
36. Wieland, "An Psyche":

... Und niemand fragte, wer ist denn der?
Wir fiihlten beim ersten Blick, 's war Er!
... So hat sich nie in Gottes Welt
Ein Menschensohn uns dargestellt...
[And no one asked, who is that, anyway? We felt at first sight that it was he! ... In God's
world, no son of man ever presented himself to us in such a way.... J
In Teutscher Merkur (January 1776); Wieland himself did not admit the poem into his collected
works. Goethe, for his part, was generous with apotheosis; thus, describing Gerstenberg's
tragedy Ugolino (1768): It was "made with the power of gods." This remark is in the immediate
neighborhood of "Prometheus": The letter that reports it-a letter from the Danish diplomat
Schonbom to Gerstenberg (who was also a Danish civil servant), dated October 11, 1773, from
Frankfurt-also contains the information that Goethe is working "with exceptional facility"
on a drama entitled Prometheus, of which he had read SchonborTl two acts, in which there
were "very fine passages, drawn up from the depths of nature": Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22,
pp. 39-40.
37. Von deutscher Baukunst (November 1772), in ~Verke, ed. Beutler, vol. 13, pp. 16-26.
38. "Zum Schakespears Tag. October 14, 1771," in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, pp. 122-126.
39. Heinrich Luden, Ruckblicke in mein Leben (Jena, 1847; rptd. Berlin, 1916), pp. 89ff.
40. To Johanna Fahlmer, beginning of May 1774, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 44-45.
41. Loose quarto page in the Strasbourg University Library, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, p. 988.
42. To J. c. Kestner, mid-July 1773, in J¥erke, cd. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 201.
Chapter 3
I. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Part VIII, section 244, in Basic Writings if Nietz.sche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), p. 368. Nietzsche saw in Napoleon one
of the "greatest continuers of the Renaissance": The Gay Science, Part V, section 362.
2. H. Meyer, Goethe. Das Leben im Werk (Stuttgart: Gunther, 1967), p. 22.
3. Gesprache mit Eckermann, April 5, 1829; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 339-340.
4. Tagebuch Frederic jacob Sorets, January 18, 1830; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 657: ']e lui ai
dit qu'il s'y trouvait des passages de memoires de Talleyrand ou il etait question de lui et de
son entrevue avec Napoleon, cela l'a fait rougir."
5. August 8, 1822, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 226.
6. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 560. To Zeiter, too, he is content to indicate vaguely, "The
Emperor of France showed himself very well inclined toward me": October 30, 1808, in Werke,
ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 567. A little more is allowed to show through by what he writes to
Cotta: "I will readily admit that in my life nothing higher and more gratifYing could happen
to me than to stand before the French Emperor, and especially in the way that I did":
December 2, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 572.
7. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 12, p. 635.
8. August 30, 1827, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 500.
9. Heine, Die Romantische Schule I; Samtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1968- ), vol. 3, p. 405.
10. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 205-206.
II. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 799. Even in his diary, Goethe notes an omen relating to
Napoleon. At the Napoleon celebration in Frankfurt, during the fireworks the emperor's name
had in the end been enveloped in a cloud of smoke, so that it ceased to be visible, "which
was received by the multitude as an omen": entry from August 22, 1806, Tagebucher (Zurich:
Artemis, 1964), p. 268.
13. Ibid., vol. 24, pp. 429-431.
14. Ibid., p. 469.
15. Gesprache mit Eckermann, December 6, 1829; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 373-374.
17. Gesprache mit Eckermann, February 28, 1831; Werke. ed. Beutler, vol 24, p. 743.
18. Gesprache mit Eckermann, February 29, 1824; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 100-101.
19. Gesprache mit Eckermann, March 21, 1831; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 484-485.
667
20. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols; or, How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, sec. 48, in The Portable
Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), p. 553; Werke (Musarion ed.), vol.
17, p. 149.
21. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, sec. 49, pp. 552-554; Werke, vol. 17, pp. 149-150.
23. Tagebiicher, May 23, 1807.
24. Gespriiche mit Eckermann, March 1832; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 510.
25. Goethe to F. Forster, August 4, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 761.
26. E. M. Arndt, Erinnerungen aus dem l:£usseren Leben, ed. F. M. Kircheisen (Munich, 1913),
p. 193.
28. Heine to Vamhagen, February 28, 1830, in Briefe, ed. F. Hirth (Mainz: Kupferberg, 1950-1951),
vol. 1, p. 426.
29. Friedrich von Muller, Erinnerungen aus den Kriegszeiten von 1806-1813 (Leipzig, 1911), pp.
I 72ff.
31. Ibid., vol. 23, p. 531.
32. Johann Daniel Falk, Goethe aus naherem peTSc;"nLichem Umgang dargestellt (Leipzig, 1832); Werke,
ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 512-513. Falk, too, had attempted a Prometheus, in 1803.
33. When the woman who, before Goethe, had withstood the Corsican's gaze died in 1830,
Goethe felt as a result of this event a change in his own reality among his contemporaries:
"I seem mythical to myself, now that I, so alone, am left." To Jenny von Pappenheim, February
14, 1830, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 664.
34. Meyer, Goethe, p. 14. This most clearheaded of Goethe's biographers desCl;bes the ovel"all
effect of his denial of legitimation to Christiane as follows: "By doing this he himself brought
himself into lasting oppositions, cut himself off from society, disnlpted domestic hospitality,
imposed on his son a tragic and destnlCtive life, and yet scarcely gained anything by it, being
no more productive than before or afterward."
35. K. L. von Knebel, Literarischer Nachlass und Briejwechsel, ed. K. A. Vamhagen von Ense and
Th. Mundt (Leipzig, 1835-1836), vol. I, p. XXIX.
36. GOf'the aLs Perso·nlichkeit, ed. H. Amelung (Munich: Miilkr, 1914-1925), vol. 1, p. 139.
37. Literarische Zustande und Zeitgenossen in Schildenwgf'n aus K. A. Bo·ttigers handschriftlichnn Nachlass,
ed. K. W. Bottiger (Leipzig, 1838), vol. I, pp. 51 fr And: "In those days everyone had to dress
in the Werther-style dress coat, which the duke also wore, and for anyone who could not
procure one, the duke had one made. For Wit'land alone, the duke himself made an exception":
ibid., vol. I, pp. 203-204.
38. Heinrich Voss to F. K. L. von Seckendorff, December 6, 1806, in Goethe als Peno·nlichkeit,
vol. 2, p. 72.
668
39. Goethe to Kestner, on the birth of his first son, May 11, 1 774, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol.
18, p. 222.
40. Henriette von Knebel to Karl von Knebel, December 1, 1802, in K. L. von Knebels Briefwechsel
mit seiner Schwester Henriette, ed. H. Duntzer gena, 1858), pp. 157-158. Poetry becomes for
Goethe the means more of avoiding than of transforming the reality of daily burdens and
bothers. [He said thad "He gets rid of things by putting them into poems." To S. Boisseree,
August 8, 1815.
41. Goethe's statement to Boisseree, August 8, 1815, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 814-815.
When Eckermann finally wants to know to what passage in Werther Napoleon's objections did
in fact refer, Goethe first makes him guess, and when he has done so, not unskillfully, makes
him settle for the answer that whether Napoleon meant this passage or another "was not
something he thought it good to divulge": January 2, 1824, in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 24,
p. 546. Heinrich Meyer concisely formulates the historian's skepticism about ever being able
to penetrate this confidentiality: "The only thing that seemed to me to be really convincing
in relation to Goethe's own assessment of this audience was the fact that during his flight
from Russia, Napoleon thought about Goethe; but why he did so, then, we again do not
know": Die Kunst des Erz.ahlens (Bern: Francke, 1972), p. 118.
42. WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 727.
43. Friedrich von Muller, Erinnerungen aus den Kriegsz.eiten von 1806-1813, pp. 1 72ff. Muller
bases his account on Goethe's having "gradually communicated the details (sic) of that con-
versation" to him, and having given him, shortly before his death, what was "still a very
laconic" written account. In Goethe's own outline of 1824, Napoleon's utterance is located
elsewhere, as a greeting rather than something said after Goethe's departure: "The emperor
beckons to me to come forward. I remain standing at a suitable distance, in front of him.
After he had attentively looked at me, he said: 'Vous etes un homme.' I bow.... " Since the
emperor's question immediately follows-"How old are you?"-the whole could also be an
examination of his personal condition: WerRe, ed Beutler, vol. 12, p. 636. Muller hit the mark
better here, even though not everything in his account inspires confidence. What may the
Corsican have said when he justified his summons to the poet to come to Paris with the
statement: "There is a wider view of the world there!" [Dort gibt es grossere Weltanschauung!l-
since he can scarcely have used this later so familiar and so infamous foreign word, which
Goethe was to invent (that is, to reconstruct, under the influence of Romanticism, from Weltansicht,
which he had preferred since 1797) only in 1815? See A. Gotze, "Weltanschauung," Euphorion
25 (1924).
44. Gesprache mit ECRermann, February 16, 1826; WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol 24, p. 175. The remark
cannot be reproduced in isolation without a slight alteration; it follows immediately, word for
word, in its context.
45. Tag- undJahreshefte (1815), in WerRe, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 873-874.
46. Sulpiz Boisseree appends, in parentheses, to his notes of a conversation with Goethe on
August 8, 1815, about (among other things) the audience in Erfurt: "Goethe seems not to have
noticed, or not to want to notice, that all of this had been planned to impress him-as I
interpret it." See E. Firmenich-Richartz, Die Bruder Boisseree gena, 1916), pp. 400-410.
47. Gesprache mit Eckermann, December 7, 1823; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 536.
48. Gesprache mit Eckermann, Febnlary 10, 1830; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 392.
49. Karl August Vamhagen's account of a communication by Gersdorff, to his wife Rahel on
July 8, 1815, from Frankfurt, in A us dem Nachfass Varnhagens von Ense. Briifwechsel z.wischen
669
Varnhagen und RaheL, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig, 1874-1875), vol. 4, pp. 188-189. From Varnhagen
we also have a memorandum about an afternoon and evening spent with Goethe on July 8,
1825. In a conversation that starts from Varnhagen's Biographische DenkmaLe [Biographical mon-
umentsl, which had begun to appear in 1824, especially those dealing with the commanders
Derffiinger and Leopold von Anhalt-Dessau, whose business was "real attacking," Goethe is
reminded of his "words aimed at characterizing" Napoleon; he responds, with a shrug of the
shoulders, "Yes, that is an experiment I have attempted; we will have to see how it goes!":
Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 393. What "words aimed at characterizing" were being referred
to remains uncertain .... Goethe says to Eckerrnann on January 4, 1827, about Hugo's poem
on Napoleon: "That is fine! Because the image is true .... " To which Eckermann replies:
"What I admire in the French is that their poetry never abandons the solid ground of reality."
50. Tag- und jahreshefte (I806), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, pp. 803-804.
51. Goethe to Riemer, March 6, 1826, injahrbuch SammLung Kippenberg 4 (Leipzig, 1932), p. 44.
That Napoleon had "einen jeden aufmerksam auf sich gemacht" cannot, in the context, be
read as an assertion that Napoleon promoted himself. What is unmistakably meant is that
each person was made attentive "to himself."
52. Tag- undjahreshefte (I 807), in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 11, p. 821. One of the manuscripts
has the divergent reading that that "mythological point" had "always been live for me and
had become a continually animated fixed idea": G. Grif, Goethe iiber seine Dichtungen (Frankfurt:
Literarische Anstalt, 1901-1914), vol. 2, pt. 4, p. 50, n. 7. While the Almanac, which was called
Prometheus, becomes fused with his own Pandora, Goethe cites the latter, in its tum, as Prometheus:
ibid., items nos. 3657, 3659.
53. K. L. Fernow to Bottiger, January 7, 1807, in Goethe aLs Pers;)nLichkeit, vol. 2, p. 77.
54. Goethe invented the name of Philenls's bride, "Epimeleia" ["Care," in Greek], but not
without referring to Herder's Prometheus scenes and his poem of 1787, "Das Kind der Sorge"
[The child of carel. There, Herder takes "Care" from a fable by Hyginus (F'abuLae, no. 220):
"Cura" is the creatrix of men, and already associated with Prometheus by this counterpart
relationship to him. On the poem's prototype, see Jacob Bernays, "Herder und Hyginus,"
Rheinisches Museum 15 (I 860): 158-163; GesammeLte AbhandLungen (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1885), vol. 2,
pp. 316-321. Lost in thought-in other words, without any defiant-demiurgic intention-Cura
forms a figure of clay, which Zeus, at her request, brings to life, only to immediately lay claim
to it; in a compromise, Care receives the right to nile over men as long as they are alive. The
allegory has no background in myth. [The author discussed Hyginus's fable, and its reception,
at greater length in one of his "Glossen zu Fabeln," in Ahente, August 1981, pp. 340-344.1
55. On the metaphorics of the elements, see G. Diener, Pandora (Bad Homburg: Gehlen, 1968),
pp. 173-187. Fire and water threaten the solidity of the earth equally; but the price of pure
permanence would be equally pure sterility. Reliablility and fertility are opposing poles; the
investment of work in the earth forces them together. In this doctrine of the elements the
smith is an extreme figure, because by means of the most volatile clement he fOITes the most
rigid one into pliability, thus even surpassing the schema of agriculture.
56. To Boissen~:c, August II, 1815, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 816.
57. To Eckennann, spring 1828, in Werke, cd. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 672.
58. Goethe did not live long enough to lean1 that the Rip Van Winkle of the years of political
earthquakes had in fact existed and that fate had found him worthy of an even longer absence.
According to the report of the Gazette des Tribullaux of May 20, 1838, there had been proceedings
against the Marquis de Saint P. before the civil court of the Seine (First Chamber) "on charges
of disrespect fidness toward the ~leen Marie-Antoinette." A grotesque anachronism, because
670
the accused, since being declared incompetent in 1790, had disappeared into one of those
"maisons de sante" that were used by influential families in order to protect culpable family
members from prosecution on the pretext of their mental infirmity. This young "philosophe"
had executed the first act of revolutionary rhetoric in 1 78 7, when, during the welcoming of
the queen at the opera, he whistled, though this did not have the anticipated effect of inspiring
similar action by others. G. Lenotre, who unearthed this incident (Paris Revolutionnaire: Vieilles
Maisons, Vieux Papiers, vol. 1 [Paris: Perrin, 1900], pp. 245-255), comments that "if he had
produced his whistle two years later, he would have been the people's idol." When he was
(for form's sake) brought to court, this marquis had "slept through" a half-century, because
he was not aware of any of the "changes" that had taken place.
59. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, June 17, 1936, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold
Zweig (New York: Harcourt, 1970), p. 131. Original: BridWechsel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968), p. 141.
Max Schur, Freud's last doctor, who arranged the private lecture, describes how it came about
in Sigmund Freud: Living and Dying (New York: International Universities Press, 1972), p. 480.
60. Freud, On the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (I914), in Complete Psychological Works, vol.
14, pp. 7-8; Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10, p. 53. Again in An Autobiographical Study (I 925), in Complete
Psychological Works, vol. 20, p. 60. Original: Selbstdarstellung, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, p. 86.
61. H. Lehnert, "Thomas Manns Vorstudien zur Josephstetralogie,"jahrbuch der Schillergesellschoft 7

(I963): 479ff.
62. E. A. Ch. Wasianski, Immanuel Kant in seinen letzten Lebensjahren, ed. F. Gross (Berlin: Deutsche
Bibliothek, 1912), p. 224.
63. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, July 15, 1934, in The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold
Zweig, p. 85; BridWechsel, p. 96. This letter shows, above all, that Freud did not pull the 'Joseph
complex' out of his sleeve two years later. Even if there were no historical evidence that
Napoleon himself had hit upon the Joseph prefiguration, the procedure that Freud detects or
constructs in Napoleon's unconscious does fit his actual mentality. Napoleon set up the connection
to the biblical Joseph almost spontaneously when, on the voyage to Egypt in May 1798, with
the 165 scholars on board who were supposed to exhaust the Orient's treasures of wisdom,
he had his evening disputations, including those on the habitability of the planets-and on
the dreams and dream interpretations of Joseph in Egypt. See J. Presser, Napoleon. Historie en
Legende (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1946), p. 48; in German: Napoleon. Das Leben und die Legende
(Stuttgart: DeutscheVerlagsanstalt, 1977), p. 55.
64. Sigmund Freud to Arnold Zweig, July 15, 1934 (see note 63). Zweig had written to Freud
abollt the composition of his historical play Bonaparte in jaffa, which deals with the massacre
of three thousand Turkish prisoners. Freud's answer shows how he was already oriented
toward the theme of Napoleon two years before his letter to Thomas Mann, without already
exhibiting the pointedness of the 'Joseph complex.'
Chapter 4
1. To Eckermann, February 10, 1830, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 393: "Napoleon gives
us an example of how dangerous it is to raise oneself into the absolute and to sacrifice
everything to the realization of an idea."
2. To Eckermann, February 28, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, pp. 465-466: "Therefore
it was appropriate, in this volume, to speak of that secret, problematical power that everyone
perceives, that no philosopher explains, and that the religious person evades with the help of
a consoling word. Goethe calls this inexpressible riddle of the world and life the 'demonic,'
671
and when he describes its character we feel that it is so and it seems to us as though the
curtains before certain hidden aspects of our life were drawn aside."
3. To Eckermann, March 2, 1831, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 24, p. 469.
4. Dichtung und Wah rheit , Part Four, Book 20, ed. Scheibe, p. 642.
5. S. Scheibe, " 'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse.' Goethes Motto zum vierten Teil von Dichtung
und Wahrheit?" Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschojt 26 (I 964): 320-324. The letter from Eckermann
is quoted on p. 323.
6. F. W. Riemer, Mittheilungen uber Goethe, ed. A. Poll mer (Leipzig, 192 I), p. 188.
7. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 450. For the spelling I rely on M. Mommsen, "lur Frage der
Herkunft des Spruches 'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,' " Jahrbuch der Goethe-GeseLlschojt 13
(I 95 I): 87, where Riemer's diaries are quoted after the original communication by R. Keil
Weutsche Revue XI, I, p. 63) and, among other things, the spelling of the name "linkgraf'
differs from that given in Beutler's edition of Goethe's Werke. Julius linkgrafs Apophthegmata
had first appeared in Strasbourg in 1626 and had many later editions; the "extraordinary
saying" was not to be found in any of them. The name appears as "linkgref' in the first
edition.
8. Scheibe, " 'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,' " p. 322, n. II.
9. Ibid., p. 324. The motto is not included in the historical-critical edition of Dichtung und
Wahrheit edited by Scheibe.
10. Mommsen, "lur Frage der Herkunft des Spruches," p. 87.
II. Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, pp. 434-435. In Beutler's edition the remark is assigned to the
"beginning of the year" 1807, no doubt not without the supposition that it must, by its logic,
have preceded the invention of the "extraordinary saying" on May 16.
12. Satyros, second act; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 4, p. 20 I.
13. Halloren were the workers in the saltworks at Halle, who spoke a special dialect, unintelligible
to those around them, and were consequently regarded as isolated remnants with either a
Slavic or a Celtic origin. "The most miserable Hallore" would thus be "the strangest man,
one who had drifted here from unknown regions." Thus, A. Grabowsky, "Das Motto des IV.
Teils von 'Dichtung und Wahrheit,' " Trivium 3 (I 945): 247.
14. Contrary to the assertion of Momms{'n, "lur Frage der Herkunft des Spruch{'s," p. 86.
15. If this sentence had been made availabl{' to readers anywhere aftfT the invention of printing,
Goethe would not have been the first to find it notable and worth quoting. But one only
n{'eds to imagine what a questionable profit proof of the origin of the s{'ntenc{' would yield
for Goethe research if, contrary to what I assume, som{'one should someday succeed in
providing it. The question (perhaps no easier to answer) of what it may have meant in the
place where it was found would displace entir{'ly the more important qtwstion of what Goethe
had (as it turned out) 'found' l'gifunden'l, rather than 'invented' l'eifimden'l, in it. To that extent,
th{' thesis that Goethe invented the saying would, in any cas{', hav{' b{'en morc bendlcial,
even if at some point it should have to be abandoned as a result of an actual discov{'ry. It
leads to the one central question: Is it such a matter of course that the saying seems "extra-
ord ina ry" to Goethe?
I fl. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die IJegende von der Erledigll11g jfder Po/iti-l(hf'TI Theologi('
(Berlin: Dune-ker & Humblot, 1970), pr. 121-122.
672
17. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, Werke und Schriften, ed B. Titel and H. Haug (Stuttgart:
Goverts, 1966-1967), vol. 2, p. 435.
18. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 762.
19. W. Brocker, Der Gott des Sophokles (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1971), pp. 18-19, as well as
p. 36, where it is demonstrated that the conflict, which is possible in Aeschylus, is no longer
present in Sophocles. Gods against gods-that is not only the principle of Aeschylean tragedy
but also of the genealogies in myth, of the opposition in it between above and below. On this
see especially J. J. Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht, vol. 1; GesammeLte Werke (Basel: Schwabe, 1943-1967),
vol. 2, pp. 190-206.
20. Scheibe, " 'Nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse,' " pp. 322-323.
21. R. Fischer-Lamberg, "Aus dem Riemer-Nachlass," Jahrbuch der Goethe-GeseLLschoft 16 (1954):

346.
22. Ibid., pp. 345-346. Although we are told that, by its location in the notebook, Goethe's
excerpt is to be dated to "approximately the end of 1809," no connection to the saying can
be established. Philology just cannot proceed any further.
23. The verse is in Ovid, Tristia I 2, 4.
24. Maximen und Rejlexionen 807; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 9, p. 745. The aphorism about the
three '-theisms' and what they correspond to in human life is found in a draft of the letter
he sent to Jacobi on January 6, 1813, which completes his argument with the latter's Von den
go'ttlichen Dingen und ihrer OJlenbarung [On divine things and their revelation], an argument that
had begun with the challenge of Goethe's poem, "Gross ist Diana der Epheser" [Great is Diana
of the Ephesians] (August 23, 1812). Three months after the letter to Jacobi, Goethe discovers
for the first time the connection between Egmont, which had occupied him for so long (I 774-1 787),
and the category of the "demonic" {Diary, April 4, 1813)-the connection that, in Dichtung
und Wahrheit {the fourth part was written in 1830-1830, conceals Napoleon.
25. A note of Riemer's, not more precisely dated, from the years 1803 to 1814, in Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 22, p. 746. Goethe returns to ZinkgraJ on June 2, 1807; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol.
22, p. 458.
26. Maximen und Rejlexionen 1039; Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 9, p. 631.
27. To Johann Gottfried Herder, Febnlary 20, 1786, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 911:
"One who loves God cannot be concerned that God should love him in retunl .... " Goethe
says to Adele Schopenhauer, in 1819, that he always has "the good fortune ... to open books
to the most important passages": Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 23, p. 44.
28. Luther, Disputatio contra schoLasticam theoLogiam (1517), n. 17: "Non potest homo naturaliter
velie deum esse deum, immo vellet se esse deum et deum non esse deum."
29. Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata I, 14.
30. To Charlotte von Stein, November 9, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 811.
31. To Karl von Knebel, November 11, 1784, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 811.
32. To Karl von Knebel, November 18, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 889.
33. To Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, January 12, 1785, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 834.
673
34. To Charlotte von Stein, May 19, 1778, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. .18, p. 394.
35. Jean Paul, Vorschule der A~thetik III 3; Horn if Oberon: Jean Paul RichterJs ((School Jor Aesthetics,"
trans. Margaret R. Hale (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 307.
36. To J. c. Kestner, April 25, 1773, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 196.
37. To Lavater, January 8, 1777, Postscript, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 18, p. 356. Later, Goethe
writes to the same addressee: "Even your Christ I have never considered and admired with
more pleasure than in these letters .... I do not begrudge you this happiness, since without
it you would be bound to be miserable.... Only I cannot regard it as anything but unjust
and a robbery, which is unbecoming to your good cause, when you strip all the precious
feathers from the thousand kinds of birds beneath the heavens-as though they were usurped-
so as to bedeck your Bird of Paradise exclusively with them." June 22, 1781, in Werke, ed.
Beutler, vol. 18, p. 599.
38. K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebiicher, June 26, 1843, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig: Brockhaus,
1861-1905), vol. 2, p. 194: "General von Ruhle told me how Goethe himself once said to
him .... "
39. Schiller to Korner, 1788-1789, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 178. When Schiller learns
of Goethe's second "Prometheus" plan, he evidently no longer perceives any connection to
what he had once noticed in Goethe that was very close to this self-consciousness: "He is now
occupied with a tragedy in the ancient Greek manner. The subject is the liberation of Prometheus. "
To Korner, April 1-10, 1795, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 223.
40. Goethe to Riemer, February 1, 1808, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 22, p. 482.
41. K. Mommsen, Kleists Kampf mit Goethe (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1974). It will be evident that I
owe more to this book than can be repaid with one footnote.
42. Erasmus, Adagia V 1,95 (from Sophocles, Antigone, line 1044); Ausgewahlte Werke, ed. W. Welzig
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1967- ), vol. 7, p. 596.
43. Schmitt, Politische Theologie II, p. 116 (quoting Gregory Nazianzenus, Oratio Theologica lII, 2).
44. Schelling, Philosophie der Mythologie (1856; rptd. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1957), vol. 1, p. 481.
45. Charlotte von Schiller to the nnure Princess Karoline von Mecklenburg, Weimal-, July 2,
1814, in Charlotte von Schiller und ihre Freunde (Stuttgart, 1860-1862), vol. 1, p. 691.
Part V
Chapter I
1. Franziska, Countess Reventlow, Briefr, 2d ed. (Frankn1ft: Fischer, 1977), p. 217 (Liibeck,
January 30, 1891).
2. Diderot, Rijiaatiorl suivie de [>ouvragr dJIlr/v/t/us intituli Cholllllle, in Oeuvrl'S, cd. J. t\ss('zat
(P;l.ris, 1875), vol. 2, pp. 275-456. [See p. 374 for the 'multiplication' ofPromctheus, and p. 432
for the quotation in the second paragraph following this one.]
674
3. Jules Michelf't, Histoire de France, vol. 17 (Paris, 1866), pp. 437-438; "C'est Ie vrai Promethee.
II fit plus que des oeuvres. II fit surtout des hommes. II soufHa sur la France, soufHa sur
l' Allemagne. Celle-ci l'adopte plus que la France encore, par la voix solennelle de Goethe."
4. Kant, "Von einem neuerdings erhobenen vornehmen Ton in der Philosophie," in Gesammelte
Schriflen (Akademie ed.), vol. 8, p. 406.
5. Kant, "Fortgesetzte Betrachtung der seit einiger Zeit wahrgenommenen Erderschtitterungen"

(I 756), in Gesammelte Schriften (Akademie ed.), vol. 1, p. 472.
6. F. Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry, trans. E. Behler and R. Struc (University Park and London:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968), p. 117. Original: "Gesprach tiber die Poesie," Athenaum
(I 800), reprinted in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe (Munich: F. Schoningh, 1958- ), vol. 2, pp.
350-351. The program for Romanticism had been preceded, in March 1799, by his turning
away from Schleiermacher: "Your God, on the other hand;.seemed to me somewhat meager."
The abstract infinity-pantheism of the talks On Religion [Uber die Religion] could not, he says,
restore the universe to "fullness." The counterweight lies in a "poetic physics," such as he
projects in the notes On Physics [Zur Physik]. "I already have notebooks on physics, so no doubt
I will soon have a physics as well," he writes to Schleiermacher; their symbolic procedure,
seeking expression in the "arabesque," should produce an "indication of infinite fullness": Aus
Schleiermachers Leben. In Briefen, ed. L. Jonas and W. Dilthey (Berlin, 1860-1863), vol. 3, pp.
88, 104.
7. Conclusion of the "Gesprach tiber die Poesie," second version; Kritische Friedrich Schlegel
Ausgabe, vol. 2, pp. 352-362.
8. "Talk on Mythology," in Dialogue on Poetry, trans. Behler & Struc, pp. 83-84; Kritische Friedrich
Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 2, pp. 315-316.
9. Transcendentalphilosophie, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 12, pp. 43, 105.
10. Philosophie der Geschichte I, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 15.
11. Philosophie der Geschichte II, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. ~.
12. Philosophie der Geschichte VII, in Kritische Friedrich Schlegel Ausgabe, vol. 9, p. 157.
13. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Samtliche Werke, ed. E. Bocking (Leipzig, 1846-1847), vol. 1,
pp. 49-60.
14. Goethe to A. W. Schlegel, Weimar, July 19, 1797, in Werke, ed. Beutler, vol. 19, p. 285.
15. Schelling, Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie (I 856), 20th lecture (rptd. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1957), pp. 457-489.
16. Ibid., p. 482, n. 4: "As nature arose for us (Idealists), the Greeks' own world of gods arose
for them, unconsciously."
17. A. Ktinzli, Karl Marx. Eine Psychographie (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966), p. 396.
18. Marx, From the Preparatory Materials [for the dissertation], Sixth Notebook; K. Marx and F.
Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975- ), vol. 1, p. 491. [Quotes in
the next three paragraphs are from pp. 491-493.] Original: Friihe Schriften, ed. H. J. Lieber
and P. Furth, 3d ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), vol. 1, pp. 102-105.
19. Hegel, Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Religion, in Samtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart:
Frommann, 1927 -1930), vol. 16, p. 107.
675
20. Marx, The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts if 1844 (New York: International Publishers,
1964), p. 147. [The quotations in this and the following paragraph are from pp. 147-149.1
Original in Friihe Schriften, vol. I, pp. 608-611.
21. F. Engels, Schriften der Friihzeit (Berlin: Springer, 1920), pp. 131-132.
22. Marx, Capital: A Critique if Political Economy (New York: International Publishers, 1967),
vol. I, p. 621. Original in Okonomische Schriften, ed. H. J. Lieber and B. Kautsky (Stuttgart:
Cotta, 1960-1964), vol. I, p. 744.
23. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 614; Okonomische Schriften, vol. I, p. 740.
24. Marx, Capital, vol. I, p. 645; Okonomische Schriften, vol. I, p. 779.
Chapter 2
I. Heine, Reisebilder II, Ideen. Das Buch Le Grand, chapter 9; Samtliche Schriften, ed. K. Briegleb
(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968- ), vol. 2, p. 276 (henceforth cited as
Schriften).
2. Heine, Reisebilder II, Die Nordsee, third part; Schriften, vol. 2, p. 232.
3. Heine, Reisebilder IV, Englische Fragmente, no. 10: "Wellington"; Schriften, vol. 2, p. 593.
4. Heine, Reisebilder III, Italien I, Reise von Miinchen nach Genua, chapter 39; Schriften, vol. 2, pp.
374-375.
5. Heine, Reisebilder IV, Englische Fragmente, no. 10; Schriften, vol. 2, p. 593.
6. Heine, Reisebilder III, Italien I, Reise von Miinchen nach Genua, chapter 28; Schriften, vol. 2,
p. 374.
7. J. Hermand, "Napoleon im Biedermeier," in Von Mainz nach Weimar. Studien zur deutschen
Literatur (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969), p. 113.
8. Heine, Franzosische Zustande IV (1832), in Schriften, vol. 3, p. 145.
9. Heine, Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland II, "Von Luther bis Kant," in
Sclzriften, vol. 3, p. 578.
10. K. A. Varnhagen von Ense, Tagebiicher, ed. L. Assing (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1861-1905), vol. 2,
p. 220.
I I. Heidelberg, August 5, 1845, in Tagebiicher, vol. 3, pp. 152- 153.
12. Heine, Deutschland. Ein lllin term arch en , section 18. Heine probably really did dream of the
Pnlssian black vulture, which ate his liv('r, because he says so also in the Gestandnisse (Schriflen,
vol. 6, pt. I, p. 459), in Die Nordsee, part 2, poem 5 (Schriften, vol. I, pp. 202ff.), and in the
preface to the Franzosisclze Zusta:nde (Schriften, vol. 3, p. 95).
13. Heine, Reisebilder I, Die Harzreise; Schriften, vol. 2, pp. 108-110.
14. M. Wen1er and H. Houben (eds.), Begegnungen mit lIeine. Berichte der Zeitgenos5eu (Hamburg:
Hoffmann und Campe, 1973), vol. I, pp. 353ff.
676
15. Heine to Heinrich Laube, February 7, 1850, in Brieje, ed. F. Hirth (Mainz: Kupferberg,
1950-1951), vol. 3, pp. 197 -198.
16. Heine to Laube, October 12, 1850, in Briefe, ed. Hirth, vol. 3, p. 232.
17. Heine to Julius Campe, August 21, 1851, in Brieje, ed. Hirth, vol. 3, p. 296. But he had
reproached Goethe with being the flame that did not want to bum; he, Heine, did not "envy
the calm little night lamps that live out their lives so modestly": Schriften, vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 628.
18. "Aufzeichnungen," in Schriften, vol. 6, pt. 1, p. 640; originally in Heine, Prosa-NachLass, ed.
E. Loewenthal (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1884; rptd. 1925), pp. 135ff., under the
heading "Aphorismen und Fragmente. ,.
19. Nietzsche, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," preface to the 1886 reissue of The Birth if Tragedy,
in Basic Writings if Nietz..sche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), pp.
17-27 (henceforth cited as Basic Writings if Nietz..sche). Original in Gesammelte Werke (Munich:
Musarion, 1920- ), vol. 21, pp. 111-124 (henceforth cited as Werke).
20. Nietzsche, "Gedanken zu 'Die Tragodie und die Freigeister,' " in Werke, vol. 3, p. 259.
21. "Kritische personliche Bemerkungen zu den eigenen Schriften der Fruhzeit," in Werke, vol.
21, p. 68.
22. "Urspnmg und Ziel der Tragodie. Nachtrage aus einer 'erweiterten Form der Geburt der
Tragodie.' Ausfiihrung des Zweiten Teils der urspriinglichen Disposition," sec. 9, in Werke,
vol. 3, pp. 280-281. What Nietzsche calls the "erweiterte Form" ["expanded form"] was sections
that were not included in the finished book.
23. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragodie," sec. 10, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 283.
25. "Vorwort an Richard Wagner. Fassung vom 22. Febnlar 1871," in Werke, vol. 3, p. 273.
The published version is dated "End of the year 1871" and does not contain "my confession
of faith."
26. "Ursprung und Ziel der Tragodie," sec. 8, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 277. One may remember
here that this book was originally supposed to be entitled Griechische Heiterkeit [Greek cheerfulness].
28. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 3, in Basic Writings if Nietz..sche, p. 42 (translation slightly revised);
Werke, vol. 3, pp. 32-33.
29. Das Griechische Musikdrama, in Werke, vol. 3, p. 187.
30. Ecce Homo (1888), in Basic Writings if Nietz..sche, p. 726; Werke, vol. 21, p. 223.
31. Basic Writings if Nietz..sche,

p. 730; Werke, vol. 21, p. 228. The conclusion of Zarathustra was
finished, in 1883, at exactly the hour-Nietzsche calls it the "holy hour"-at which Richard
Wagner died in Venice. Mythical 'significance' is seen in this, since "perhaps the whole of
Zarathustra may be reckoned as music": Basic Writings, p. 751; Werke, vol. 21, p. 247.
32. U. von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Zukuriftsphilologie! Zweites Stiick. Eine Enviderung (Berlin,

1873); reprinted in K. Grunder (ed.), Der Streit um Nietz..sche's uGeburt der Tragiidie" (Hildesheim:
G. Olms, 1969), pp. 113-135. On one point Wilamowitz has been definitively shown (something
677
that seldom occurs in philology) to have been mistaken, and Nietzsche in the right: Dionysus
did not come to Greece only "in the eighth century at the earliest," so that he was consequently
not originally a Greek god; instead, since the deciphering of the Cretan Linear B writing, the
evidence of his cult and of the associated names has confirmed his presence, even in the
Peloponnesus, as early as the thirteenth century.
33. Briife, vol. 3, p. 328, in Nietzsche's Werke und Brieje. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Munich:
Beck, 1933-1952). Bemays's treatise is again available in the reprint introduced by K. Grunder
(Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1970).
34. In Ecce Homo this is already a quotation, on the psychology of tragedy, from Twilight if the
Idols (I 888). See Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 729; Werke, vol. 17, p. 159.
35. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 4, in Basic jVritings if Nietzsche, p. 46; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 37-39. [The
next quotation is from Basic Writings, p. 47.]
36. The Birth if Tragedy,

sec. 9, in Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 70; Werke, vol. 3, p. 68. [The
quotations in the previous paragraph are from Basic Writings, p. 69.]
37. Die Jro'hliche Wissenschoft, Book Three, section 135; Werke, vol. 12, p. 163. [The prevIous
quotation is from The Birth if Tragedy, in Basic Writings, p. 72.]
38. The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House,
1967), p. 55; Werke, vol. 18, p. 68. [The previous quotation is from The Birth if Traged)l, in Basic
Writings, p. 69.]
39. "Attempt at a Self-criticism," preface to the second edition of The Birth q/Traged)I, in Basic
Writings if Nietzsche, p. 18; Werke, vol. 3, p. 4. [The previous quotations are from Basic Writings,
pp. 42, 46.]
40. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 3, in Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 42; Werke, vol. 3, p. 32.
41. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 19, in Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 115; Werke, vol. 3, p. 128.
42. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 19, in Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 121; Werke, vol. 3, pp. 133-135.
43. The Birth if Tragedy, sec. 10, in Basic Writings if Nietzsche, p. 75; Werke, vol. 3. pp. 74-75.
44. "Prometheus. Entwurf' [Prometheus: A sketch], in Werke, vol. 7, pp. 386-389.
45. The Will to Power, p. 479 (translation slightly revised); Werke, vol. 19, p. 285.
46. Preliminary work for Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in TVerke, vol. 7, p. 366.
47. The Gay Science, Book Four, section 300, "Preludes of Science," trans. \Y. Kaufmann (New
York: Random House, 1974), p. 240; Werke, vol. 12, p. 220.
48. Beyond Good and Evil, Part III, section 56, in Baszc Writings if Niet7.5c1zf. p. 258: Werke, vol.
15, pp. 75-76.
49. "Aus dem Nachlass 1882-1888," in Werke, vol. 16, p. 337.
50. C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, ed. A. Jaffe and trans. R. \Yinston and C. Winston
(New York: Random House, 196 I), p. 150.
678
Chapter 3
1. Gide, Marshlands and Prometheus Misbound, trans. George D. Painter (London: Seeker & Warburg,
1953), p. 105. Original: Le Promethee mal enchaineO 899), in Romans, Recits et Soties (Paris: Gallimard,
1958), p. 304.
2. Kafka, "Prometheus," in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Max Brod (New York: Sehoeken, 1947-1953),
vol. 5, p. 99.
Name Index
Abeken, Rudolf, 281 Baeumler, Alfred, 51 7

Adorno, Theodor, 222, 293 Balsamo, Giuseppe. See Cagliostro,
Aeschylus, xxxi, 122, 124, 304, 309-321, Alessandro di Conte
325, 330, 334, 336, 337, 381, 388, 392, Balms, Jean-Fran~ois, 264
419, 534, 583, 584, 585, 591, 598, 599, Barnacle, Nora (Mrs. James Joyce), 81, 84,
613,614, 617, 618, 672n19 642n23
Aesop, 132 Barth, Karl, 222
Alembert, Jean Le Rond d', 74 Basedow, Johann Bernhard, 447, 542-543
Alexander the Great, 47, 102-103 Basilides, 199, 259, 260
Aly, Wolf, 324 Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre, xxiii, 161
Amalie, Duchess of Sachse-Weimar, 452 Bayle, Pierre, 103, 106, 375, 459
Amphilochius, 193 Beauharnais, Eugene Napoleon de (duke of
Anaxagoras, 347, 587 Leuchtenberg), 482
Anselm of Canterbury (Saint Anselm), 248, Beckett, Samuel, 59
249-253, 256, 257, 654-655n35 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 106
Antisthenes, 336 Benn, Gottfried, 299
Antommarchi, Francesco, 596 Bergson, Henri-Louis, 109
Apollodorus, 116, 136, 143 Bernays, Jacob, 117-118,216,217,612
Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 81 Bertuch, Friedrich Justin, 491
Arago, Fran~ois, 43 Beutler, Ernst, 458
Archelaus (Herod Archelaus), 101
Blankenburg, Captain von, 278
Aristophanes, 322, 337
Bloch, Ernst, 293
Aristotle, xv, 26, 29, 117-118, 127, 201,
Blumenberg, Hans, xxxviiinna,c,f,g,
216, 223, 260, 320, 330-331, 336, 373,
xxxixnni,l,t, xlnnu,v,x,ee,gg, 32nq,
382, 544, 577, 578-580, 586, 587, 612
214nnb,c, 295nd, 521 nb, 642n 17, 645n8,
Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 485
653n19, 655n39, 660n7, 662n39, 664n22
Arnim, Achim von, 279
Boccacio, 361-362, 363, 658n 13
Arnim, Bettina von, 430, 662-663n 1
Arnobius, 358 Bohme, Jakob, 529, 533, 542
Assezat (publisher of Diderot), 565 Boisseree, Sulpiz, 471, 480, 494, 496
Augustine, Saint, 187, 198-199, 239, 245, Bonaparte, Marie (student of Freud), 57
255, 258, 360-361, 432 Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon
Bonaparte
Baader, Franz Xaver von, 438-439 Borne, Ludwig, 447, 603, 625ne
Bachofen, Johann Jakob, 68 Botticelli, Sandro, 38
Bacon, Francis, xxv, 38, 212, 361, 372-373, Bottiger, Karl August, 71, 72, 79, 80, 423,
389 439,491-492
680
Name Index
Bourrienne, Louis-Antoine de, 466 Descartes, Rene, vii, xvi, xxv, xxviii-xxix,
Brod, Max, 3 xxxii, 50, 163, 177, 178, 243, 267, 268,
Brucker, Jakob, 375 269, 284, 377, 380, 395na, 604, 608
Bruno, Giordano, 361, 412, 578 Diderot, Denis, 74, 393, 418, 563-565
Buchner, Georg, 149 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 67, 661 n 1 7
Budgen, Frank, 81 Dio Chrysostom, 86, 336
Bultmann, Rudolf, 187-188,222,224,291, Diodorus Siculus, 458
494 Diogenes of Sinope, 86, 336, 340
Burckhardt, Jacob, 68-69, 122-123, 143, Dionysius of Alexandria, 193
219-220,234,239-240,241,320,347, Duns Scows, John, 229
362-363, 561-562
Butor, Michel, xxxii, 276, 277, 280, 288 Eberwein, Karl, 523
Byron, Lord (George Gordon Byron), 468, Eckermann, Johann Peter, 435-436, 437,
562 466,467-468,473,476-477,478-479,
480, 482, 484, 494-495, 496, 499, 523,
Caesar, Julius, 471-472, 486, 488-489, 496 524, 526, 536
Caesarius of Heisterbach, 141 Egmont, Count, 524, 539
Cagliostro, Allessandro di Conte (orig. Eichhorn (Prussian censor), 592
Giuseppe Balsamo), 71-74, 112nj, 441, Einstein, Albert, 229
443, 444, 512 Ellman, R., 83
Caligula (Roman emperor), 122 Empedocles, 124
Calvin, John, 222-223 Enfantin, Prosper, 599
Campanella, Tommaso, 42 Engel, Johann Jacob, 279, 416
Camus, Albert, xxx, 69 Engels, Friedrich, 592
Cardano, Girolamo, 105 Enghien, Louis-Antoine-Henri d', 488
Carl August, duke of Saxe-Weimar, 481, Epicurus, 13,45,106,121,238,240,281,
490, 491 284, 345, 346, 585, 586, 588
Carp ani, 405 Epimenides, 442, 448, 463ne
Cassirer, Ernst, viii-ix, x, xi, xiii, xiv, xvi, Epiphanius of Salamis, 193
xxiv, xxv, xxvi, xxxi, 50,51,64,117, Erasmus, Desiderius, 368-372, 550-551,
128,160-161,167-168 551-552
Catherine of Siena, 552 Ernesti, 158
Cato, 77 Ernst, Dr. (teacher of Franziska Reventlow),
Celsus, 193 562
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 68 Erwin of Steinbach, 453, 455, 456, 457
Christ (Jesus), 39, 101, 103, 104-105, 106, Euripides, 318, 337, 616
155, 193, 197, 238, 480-481 Eusebius of Caesarea, 10 1, 197
Christy, James, 43 Eznik of Kolb, 197
Clement of Alexandria, 185-186 Ezra, 140, 218
Cohen, Hermann, 50
Co let, John, 368 Fahlmer, Johanna, 460
Colloredo, Count, 475 Falk, Johann Daniel, 488
Comte, Auguste, 110-Ill Fehling, Emanuel, 562
Copernicus, 372 Ferenczi, Sandor, 5, 9, 89
Correggio, 219-220, 553 Fernow, Karl Ludwig, 499
Cratinus, 321 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 28, 209-210, 289, 290
Curtius, Ludwig, 211 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxvi,
xxxvii, 266, 268, 472, 594ng
Daniel, 189 Ficino, Marsilio, 364-367, 373
Dante, 76, 79, 80, 276, 355-356 Flaubert, Gustave, 257
Dart, Raymond A., 563 Fliess, Wilhelm, 55, 57, 242
Danl, Pierre-Antoine-Noel-Bruno, 470, 471, Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de, 19, 106,
472 107, 232-233, 263-264, 265, 567, 655n 1
Deichgraber, 319 Forster, Georg, 407, 438
Demandt, A., 104 Frankel, Hermann, 137
Democritus, 329, 331 Franklin, Benjamin, 569
681
Name Index
Freud, Sigmund, viii, ix, xii, xvi, 5, 6, 8, 20, Haydn, Franz Joseph, 405
55, 56-57, 86-88, 89, 90-95, 116, 119, Hederich, Benjamin, 392, 403-404, 405,
151,242,271,481,516-521,621-625, 406, 459, 654n21
627, 636, 643n29, 643n34, 670nn63,64 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xxxii,
Friedrich (Goethe's servant), 478 xxxiv, xlnbb, 107-108, 498, 584, 586,
Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 14 587, 589, 591, 601
Fritz, Kurt von, 303, 656n 10 Heidegger, Martin, xxiii, xxxiv, xxxvi,
Frommanns (friends of Goethe), 527 xxxviiing, 68, 92, 109, 110, 179, 222,
Fuhnnann, Manfred, 356 224, 270, 288
Heine, Heinrich, 13,46,47,225,279-280,
Galileo, 50 473,485-486,536,537,595-604,625nf,
Galle, Johann Gottfried, 43 652-653n8
de Gaulle, Charles, 188 , Heine, Maximilian (brother of Heinrich),
Gehlen, Arnold, xxii, xxiv, xxix, 136, 280
173nnd,e Helvetius, 563, 564
George, Stephan, 51 Hennings, August, 414
Gibbon, Edward, 243 Heraclitus, 91
Gide, Andre, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 175, 195, Herder, Caroline (wife of Johann), 388
348, 627, 628-631 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 60, 61, 62,
Gleim, J. W. Ludwig, 388, 452, 543 157, 388-392, 458, 540, 542-543,
Goethe, August (son of Johann), 471-472, 655-656nl
473, 476, 492 Herodotus, 20, 35, 36, 115, 152-153, 639n 1
Goethe, Christiane (wife of Johann), 470, Herostratus, 103
489-490, 492, 667n34 Herschel, Sir William, 43, 44
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xii, Herz, Marcus, 4 16
xxxi-xxxii, 10, 15, 17, 24, 68, 70-75, 79, Hesiod, xx, xxxi, 16, 25, 30-31, 32, 35, 38,
105, 108, 154, 157, 174, 243, 264, 266, 39,40,42,115,118,119-120,121,122,
275, 276, 278, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284, 123-124, 129, 135, 151, 158, 159, 160,
302, 304, 335, 342, 375, 392, 393, 399, 181, 235-236, 241, 302-303, 304,
400-401,403,404-409,410,413, 305-309,310,315,317,320,324,326,
414-416,419,420-422,424,425-427, 333, 336, 343, 345, 351, 352, 450, 458,
430-431, 432-463, 465-515, 518, 521,
611,648n17
523-533, 534-541, 542-550, 551,
Heyne, 158
553-554, 556, 561, 563, 565, 568, 572,
Heyse, Paul, 216, 261 na
576-577, 584, 595, 597, 598, 599, 600,
Hieronymus, 358
613,635, 652nl, 661nl0, 662nn26,31,
Hillel the Second (Rabbi), 125
663nn3,5, 664nn25,29, 666nn6, 11,
Hippolytus, Saint, 259
667nn33,34, 668nn40,41,43,46, 669n49,
Hobbes, Thomas, xv, xvi, xxix, 333,
670nl, 670-671n2, 673n37
373-374, 378
Goldberg, Oskar, 51 7
Hoffmeister, Johannes, 107-108
Goldstein, Kurt, 5
Holbach, Paul-Henri-Dietrich d', 418
Gorgias, 608, 64 8n 17
Gottsched, Johann Christoph, 107, 342, Hollmann, Samuel Christian, 568
343-344 Homer, xiii, xx, 16, 35, 40, 77, 81, 114,
Gratian (Roman emperor), 238 116, 121, 122, 132, 135, 137, 151, 152,
Gregory of Nazianzus, 552 155-156,158,241,276,302,320,351,
Grimm, Wilhelm, 154 450, 648n 17
Griiner, Joseph Sebastian, 469-470, Hopfuer (legal scholar), 543
475-476 Horace, 306
Gundert, Maria, 37 Hugo, Victor, 497
Gutzkow, Karl, 595 Humboldt, Alexander von, 438
Hume, David, 418
Habennas, Jiirgen, xxxixnl Hummel, Johann Nepomuk, 467
Hadrian (Roman emperor), 510 Husserl, Edmund, 243
Haeckel, Ernst, 8
Harnack, Adolf von, 78, 181, 182, 195, 197, lfHand, August Wilhelm, 510
198, 649n3, 650n 11 lrenaeus of Lyons, 186, 197. 199. 229
682
Name Index
Iser, Wolfgang, 83-84 Langer, Ernst Theodor, 461

Israel of Rischin (Rabbi), 226 Laplace, Pierre-Simon de, 52
Las Cases, Emmanuel-Augustin-
Jacobi, Auguste (niece of Friedrich), 662n26 Dieudonne-Joseph de, 596
Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 392, 407-414, Laube, Heinrich, 603
415, 416-422, 423, 424, 425-426, Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 73, 408, 423-424,
433-434, 444, 458, 539, 542-543, 567, 441,443,447,512,542-543,546,673n37
661n10 Lec, Stanislaw Jerzy, 11
James, William, 243 Leclerc, Jean, 264
Jaucourt, Chevalier de, 393-395 Lehmann, Edvard, 16
Jauss, H. R., 172, 284 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 50, 96, 246,
Jesus (Christ), 39, 101, 103, 104-105, 106, 247,267,431,439
155,193, 197,238,480-481 Lenz, Jakob Michael, 407, 422, 533-535,
John the Apostle, 23, 137, 200-201, 552, 553, 554
219-220 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, xxxii, 196,
John the Lydian, 335 278-279, 282-283, 284, 407-408,
Jonas, Hans, xxxiv, xxxv, 179, 185, 186, 409-414,415,416-419,420,421-422,
199, 205, 290-291, 649n4, 650n6 423,424, 425, 539, 540, 661n17
Josiah (king of Judah), 140 Leverrier, Urbain-Jean-Joseph, 43
Joyce, James, vii, 34, 80-85, 87, Levi-Strauss, Claude, 271-272
642-643n23 Levy- Bruhl, Lucien, xii
Joyce, Nora (Mrs. James Joyce), 81, 84, Lichtenberg, Friedrich August, 423-425
642n23 Linnaeus (Carl von Linne), 38
Julian (Roman emperor), 86, 338, 339-341 Locke, John, xv
Jung, c. G., xii, xvi, 93-94, 624 Logier (French Jesuit), 453-454
Junger, Ernst, 8-9, 64 8n 19 Loisy, AlfTed-Finnin, 222
Justin, Saint, 198 Lord, A. B., xxi
Louis-Phillippe (king of France), 597-598
Kafka, Franz, vii, xxxi, xxxii, xxxiii, 3, 175, Lowe, Hudson, 474, 596
633-636 Lowell, Percival, 43
Kant, Immanuel, viii, xxxv-xxxvi, xxxvii, Lowith, Karl, xxxi
xlngg, 49-50, 52, 56, 169, 170-171, 243, Lucian, 303, 326, 342, 343, 345-346, 347,
418
267, 268, 291-292, 293, 295ni, 366, 375,
Lucretius, 118, 329
380, 392, 400, 412, 431, 432, 519-520,
Luden, Heinrich, 460
567-569, 575, 594ng, 604
Ludwig (crown prince of Bavaria), 15
Kastner, Abraham Gotthelf, 219, 417
Luise, Dutchess of Saxe-Weimar, 489
Kayser, Phillip Christoph, 71, 444
Lukacs, Georg, xxxi
Kepler, Johannes, 50
Luke, Saint, 39,78, 101, 103-104, 105, 137,
Kestner, Johann Georg, 405, 492-493, 546
154, 182, 190,258
Kierkegaard, S0ren, 144
Luther, Martin, 78, 102, 155, 222-223, 224,
Klages, Ludwig, 68
252,541,542,545,551,577
Kleist, Heinrich von, 86, 88, 548, 549 Lycurgus, 20
Kleist, Ulrike (sister of Heinrich), 549
Klettenberg, Susanna Katharina von, 542 Mach, Ernst, 284, 285
Klinger, Max, 565, 566 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 592-593
Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 450-451 ManfTedini (designer of commemorative
Knebel, Henriette von (sister of Karl), 493 medal), 485
Knebel, Karl Ludwig von, 416, 481, 482, Mani, 191
491, 543 Manilius, 545
Koller (French genera}), 494 Mann, Thomas, vii, xxvi, 98, 229-230, 388,
Komer, Theodor, 438-439, 485, 576 481, 516, 520-521, 646n35, 653n11
Koster, Heinrich Martin Gottfried, 377 Manzoni, Alessandro, 470, 474, 479
Kuhn, Thomas S., 167 Marcion, 78, 154, 181, 182, 184, 186, 189,
190-191, 194, 195, 196, 197-198, 199,
Lactantius, 153, 357, 358, 359 201, 206, 217, 238, 325, 553, 649n3,
Lamprecht, Helmut, 113 650n8
683
Name Index
Marie-Antoinette {queen of France}, 70, O'Meara {Napoleonic "evangelist"}, 596

112nj. See also Cagliostro, Alessandro di Origen, 95, 103, 105, 191, 193, 199, 238,
Conte 256
Mark, Saint {Evangelist}, 104, 137 Ostwald, Wilhelm, 242
Marlowe, Christopher, 17, 277 Otto, Christian, 478
Marx, Karl, 584, 585-589, 590-592, 593-594 Otto, Rudolf, 14,20,2],28,62,518
Massenbach, Christian von, 497 Ovid, 65, 235, 236, 237, 351-356, 358, 359,
Mattesilano, Matteo, 171, 173ni 362, 538, 658n 13
Matthew, Saint, 39-40, 104, 137,461
Melchinger, Siegfried, 318 Palm, johann Philipp, 488
Menander, 328, 336 Parry, Milman, xxi
Mendelssohn, Moses, 278, 409-410, 413, Pascal, Blaise, 233, 243, 287, 653n 17
416,417-419,422,423,540 f>aul, jean, 60, 122, 478, 545
Merck, johann Heinrich, 451, 543, 557ni Paul, Saint, 20, 24, 25, 28, 78, 139, 182,
Milton, john, vii 184, 185, 189, 191-192, 194, 195, 197,
Mohammed, 41, 123 201, 224, 225, 236, 252-256, 305
Mommsen, Katharina, 548, 549 Paulus, Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob, 600-60 I
Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 11 Pericles, 1 1
Montfaucon, Bernard de, 219 Perier, Casimir, 597-598
Moritz, Karl Philipp, 441, 442 Peterson, Erik, 101
Moses, 28, 139, 206 Phidias, 347
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 480 Philebus, 53
Muller, Adam, 548-549 Philemon, 328
Muller, Chancellor Friedrich von, 470, 471, Philostratus, 25
473,478,483,486,487,494,526,536 Picasso, Pablo, 627
Musil, Robert, 108 Pindar, 317, 450
Plato, 27, 45, 49-50, 53, 118, 122-123, 129,
Napoleon Bonaparte, xxxi, 46-47, 71, 106, 134, 169, 176, 204-205, 238, 255, 256,
400, 439, 442, 444, 448, 460, 465-478, 305, 326, 328, 330-331, 334-335, 336,
479-489,490,493-494,495-497,498, 345, 353, 366, 369, 383, 432, 504,
501, 505, 509-510, 511, 514, 515, 567-568, 586, 587, 608. See also Socrates
518-520, 523-524, 530-531, 532, Pliny, 382
535-536, 537, 538-539, 550, 569-570, Plotinus, 77, 185,270,364,367,545
592, 595-596, 597, 666nn6, 11, Plutarch, II, 102-103, 381, 585
668nn41,43, 669n49, 670n63,1 Polycarp of Smyrna, 197-198
Natorp, Paul, 49 Ponto, jiirgen, 293, 295nj
Nausiphanes, 240 Pope, Alexander, 439
Nehemiah, 140, 218 Porada, Kathe von, 299
Nelson, Leonard, 14 Pousseur, Henri, 276, 277, 280
Nestle, Wilhelm, 49 Praxiteles, 61 I
Newton, Isaac, 544 Protagoras, 329, 331-332, 333-334
Nicholas of Cusa, 50
Nicolai, Friedrich, 4 I 7 Racine, jean, vii
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, xxxiii, Ramberg, johann Daniel, 423
xxxiv-xxxv, xxxvi, xxxvii, 10-11, 12, 29, Rank, Otto, 269
51,90,97,98,114,176-178,209,239, Raphael, 480
241-242, 243-244, 245, 246, 247, 286, Rathenau, Walther, 109
288, 289, 290, 328, 336-338, 339, Rau, Lt"'opold, 606
347-348, 350, 351, 363-364, 399, 465, Rt"'ichard, johann Fl-iedrich, 73, 279
466,480,483-484,489,516,561,562, Reimanls, Elist"' {daughter of Hcnnann}, 409,
565, 572, 604-622, 627, 630, 631, 633, 413-414
634,635,636, 648n17, 676-677n32 Rcimarus, Hermann Samuel, 193, 42811d
Novalis {Friedrich von Hardcnberg}, 49, 51, Reinhard, Carl Friedrich von, 548
438-439 Renouvier, Charles-Benunl, 243
Reycntlow, F.. anziska, 562, 594nb
Ockham, William of, 654n3 I
Ochlcnschlager, Adam Gottlob, 108
684
Name Index
Riemer, Friedrich Wilhelm, 431, 444, 449, 423-424, 425-426, 440, 479, 480, 525,
495, 498, 526-528, 530, 531, 532, 530,' 531, 539, 540-542, 543-544, 545,
535-538, 539-540, 546, 547, 548, 556 547, 550, 551, 571, 661 n 1 7, 663n 11
Riesbeck, Kaspar, 491 Stael, Madame Anne-Louise-Germaine de,
Roderer, Johann Gottfried, 405 277
Roschalin, N. M., 476 Stein, Charlotte von, 410, 424, 436, 439,
Rosenberg, Alfred, 68 451-452, 472, 493, 540, 543
Rosenzweig, Franz, 15, 245 Stein, Gertrude, 183
Rothacker, Erich, 67, 69 Stendhal, 263
Rousseau, Jean-jacques, xv, 45, 47, 223, Stolberg, Friedrich Leopold, 388, 416, 417,
243, 329, 336, 380-381, 382, 385, 386, 421,422,450,451,567, 664n29, 665n31
400, 454, 483, 491, 564, 565, 566-567, Strauss, David Friedrich, 37
589-590 Suetonius, 122
Ruhle, Johann Jakob von, 546 Sutor, Christoph Erhard, 436, 437
Rychner, j., 172 Synesius of Cyrene, 341
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 631 Tacitus, 154, 425

Scheibe, S., 528 Talleyrand, 486
Scheler, Max, xxxiii, 14, 211-213, 288 Tausk, Victor, 95, 643n34
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, Tertullian, 17, 18, 104-105, 215, 254,
xix, xxxii, xlnbb, 149-150, 213, 554-555, 261nm, 357, 361-362, 649n3
577-584, 600-601 Thales of Miletus, 11, 25, 26, 28, 29, 128,
Schiller, Charlotte von, 556 383
Schiller, Johann Christoph Friedrich von, Theodore of Mopsuestia, 238
13, 266, 400, 443, 494-495, 529, Theodosius I (Roman emperor), 198, 238,
546-547,549, 574, 576, 656nl 387
Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 275, 278, Theodotus, 187, 650n6
574-577
Thucydides, 104, 153
Schlegel, Friedrich, xix, 61, 62, 136, 311,
Tombaugh, C. W., 43
570,571,572-574,674n6
Turckheim, Wilhelm von, 492
Schleiermacher, Friedrich Ernst Daniel,
Tylor, E. B., 151
674n6
Schlosser, Johann Georg, 445, 614
Unger (Berlin publisher of Goethe), 72
Schmidt, Erich, 437
Usener, Hermann, 53
Schmitt, Carl, 532, 533, 535, 552, 554
Scholem, Gershom, 226, 227-228
Valentinus, 185, 199
Scholz, Heinrich, 41 7
Valery, Paul, vii, xxx, xxxii, xxxiii, 69-70,
Schonemann, Lili, 492, 536, 539, 557nd
Schopenhauer, Arthur, xxxii, xxxiv, xxxv, 150, 243, 277-278, 280-281, 283-287
98, 128-129, 268, 283, 288-289, 291, Varnhagen von Ense, Karl August, 213,
293, 609, 639n 1 420, 485, 546, 561, 596, 601
Schubart, Christian Friedrich, 279 Vico, Giambattista, 60, 61, 62, 85, 377-380,
Schwabe, Johann Joachim, 403, 404 655nl
Schweitzer, Albert, 154-155 Vinaver, E., 172
Shaftesbury, Third Earl of, 342 Virgil, 79, 104, 351, 352
Shakespeare, William, 216, 225, 455-456, Vischer, Friedrich Theodor, 255, 256
457-458, 480 Voltaire, 54, 74, 231, 232-233, 234, 350,
Simmel, Georg, 76, 210-211 439,457-458,459,471,486,489,496,
Sixtin, John, 368 641 n 1 7, 653n 1 7
Socrates, 53-54, 132, 144, 233-234, 255, Voss, Heinrich the younger, 492
332, 334, 336-337, 338, 345, 347, 350, Voss, Johann Heinrich, 156-158,416,421,
401, 561, 587, 608, 617. See also Plato 422
Sophocles, 271, 550, 551-552, 672n19
Sorel, Georges, xxx, 222, 223, 224 Wagner, Cosima (wife of Richard), 612
Soret, Frederic Jacob, 469 Wagner, Richard, 7, 605, 606, 609-610,
Spinoza (and Spinozism), xxxi, 392, 409, 611, 617-618
410,411-412,419-420,421,422-423, Walzel, Oskar, 342
685
Name Index
Waser, johann Heinrich, 342

Wasianski, Ehregott Andreas, 520
Weaver, Harriet Shaw, 34
Weber, Max, 646n35
Wedekind, Eduard, 280
Weisse, Christian Felix, 410
Wellington, Duke of, 487, 494
Wells, H. G., 82
Werner, Abraham Gottlob, 438-439
Wieland, Christoph Martin, 157, 281, 342,
343, 345, 381-386, 453, 458, 460,
660-661n8, 667n37
Wihl, Ludwig, 603 "
Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, 114, 115,
137,509,610-611,612,639n1,
676-677n32
Wilder, Thorton, 183
William of Ockham, 654n31
Witte (Rostock professor), 438
Wolbock, Baron von (French diplomat), 474
Wolff, Christian, 599
Wundt, Wilhelm, 20
Zelter, Carl Friedrich, 15, 400, 405, 422,

448, 481, 556
Ziegesaar, Silvie von, 470, 473
Zimmermann, johann Georg, 278
Zinkgraf,julius, 527, 537, 540, 671n7
Zumbusch, Kaspar Clemens von, 566
Zweig, Arnold, 516
has already brought ~ i;::, wor k to the
Work on Myth attention of a VrOWliJ 6 a udlen< e 0 f
by Hans Blumenberg American scholars. FrederIck Cross
translated by Robert M. Wallace refers to Blum",nberg as "the fO(Cmo8t
philosophical h' storian of Idp,a~ ill
Why, with the advent of modern sci- Germany (perhaps anywilere) " Work
ence, has myth not come to an end? on Jyfyth, with its Vv"ide range .1nd
Could it be that, rather than being wealth of implications for fields as di-
incompatible, myth and reason have verse as literature. classical studies,
complementary functions in making psychology, anthropology, philosophy,
human existence possible? religion, and the history of ideas. is
In this rich examination of how we ce~:'tain to enhance that reputation.
Inherit and transform myths, 'which Work on Myth is included in the se-
was awarded the Sigmund Freud ries Studies in Contemporary German
prize in 1980, Hans Blumenberg con- Social Thought, edited by Thomas
tin ues his study of the philosophical McCarthy.
.)
roots of the modern world. Work on
Myth is in five parts. The first two an
alyze myth's necessity and its d.istinc-
tive characteristics, and the stages in
the West's work on myth. Authors
such as Freud, Cassirer, Joyce, and
Valery are discussed at length. The
remaining three parts present a. com-
prehensi ve account of the history of
the Prometheus myth, from Hesiod
and Aeschylus to Gide and Kafka. A
special feature of this account is an
extended analysis of Goethe's lifelong
dealings with Prometheus, which is a
unique synthesis of "psychobiogra-
phy" and history of ideas.
Hans Blumenberg is Professor of
PhIlosophy at the University of
Munster. IIis first book to be trans-
ated into English, The Legitimacy of
he Modern Age (MIT Press, 1983),
.
lt1l 1S '
,
f l U fl
~1! "I. 1 by Robert M, Walla( e

In LL. !uajnr work, Blumenberg take J~ tiue with
Kar 1 .owith's well-known thesis that le idea of •
Jr('~1£ eSB is a secularized version of Christian 8scha
tology, which pronlises a dranlatic interv · ntion that
will consummate the history of the WOf J. <{J'onl out- .
didf'. InstE'ad, Blumenberg at'gues, the irk'~! ()f prog-
j'ess always implies a proceS8 at WOlt_ mithln hib-
tory, operating through an internal logic that
ultimately expresses human choice~ and is lE'gitl
mized by human self-assertion) by rr PI': responsi-
bility for his own fate.
"A great sweeping history of the couroe of
European thought, built on the Hegel-Heidegger
scale .. " ." - Richard Rorty. r;'Le Lond,on Review of
Books
"Modern science buried centuries of theological
controversy, Hans Blumenberg has unearthed t.hese
contr6versies again. rethinking the dilemnlas and
dead ends of Christian dogma that provided the in-
tellectual provocations and the scientific revolution .
. . . But Blumenberg has not merely written a
scholarly, nuanced. and illuminating study of the
religious background to modern science. 1-[e has also
written a philosophical book, a combative response
to the dilTI Romantic Huggestion, more comniOn in
Germany than America, that the modern ag~ "as a
whole' is somehow illegitimate. " - Stephen
IIolmes, The A,nerican PuiitLcal Sciencp Review
The MIT Pi (,~,s

Ma~:-:nf'hus('U~ [n~lt it II {( 'r '1..'1 nc.,luhry HI ['Yli
Caluhndg(\. :\fa ,'~( .J 'I~t tt )~ l.!:~
0-2()~-02215-X

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Work on Myth

translated by Robert M. Wallace

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

{Studies in contemporary Gennan social thought}

1 After the Absolutism of Reality 3

2 The Name Breaks into the Chaos of the Unnamed 34

4 Procedural Regulations 113

1 The Distortion of Temporal Perspective 149

2 Fundamental Myths and Art Myths 174

3 Myths and Dogmas 215

4 To Bring Myth to an End 263

1 The Reception of the Sources Produces the Sources of 299

3 Return from Existential Groundlessness 350

4 Aesthetic Brightening Up 377

1 "Priming Powder for an Explosion" 403

2 A Conflict between Gods 430

3 Prometheus Becomes Napoleon, Napoleon Prometheus 465

4 Ways of Reading the "Extraordinary Saying" 523

1 Passage through the Philosophy of History 561

2 On the Rock of Mute Solitude Again 595

3 To Bring to an End, If Not Myth, Then at Least One 627

Name Index 679

1. Our Antithetical Attitudes to Myth

In Work on Myth Hans Blumenberg addresses a question that has

nation and is assumed to have no bearing on the preeminent role of

2. A Non-Romantic Alternative to the Enlightenment's

The last German philosopher to address these questions at length was

way-as it probably is by most of us who are neither programmatic

overcoming the problem of our biological nonadaption, our consti-

that intentionally avoids distinguishing between imaginative and con-

wanted to establish. And this applies equally to the 'superepochs' of

3. The Philosophical Anthropology Underlying Blumenberg's

Before proceeding to Blumenberg's alternative to the (broadly) Ro-

to the extent that philosophy is a process of dismantling things that

of establishing man's 'civil' [biirgerlich: i.e., political as opposed to natural]

Evidently, then, the status naturalis to which Blurnenberg compares

of myths-which has been the subject of many futile efforts-is brack-

Translator's In trod uction

of formally identical "positions" in human consciousness, a structure

of the Modern Age by not "belonging to" an epoch at all: by being, as

4. A Non-"Enlightenment" Alternative to the Romantic

After thus providing an alternative to our dominant, 'Enlightenment"

"original" endowment of, if not a revelation granted to, mankind.

It is certainly a novel idea as applied to myth. Scholars who study

The organic system resulting from the mechanism of evolution becomes

instead of himself to the process of adaptation . . '.' It is to these, rather than

This striking point ties in neatly with Blumenberg's philosophical an-

mediately clear to the late grandchildren of aesthetic Idealism that

This critique of the claims made for the human imagination by a

5. Why This Theory Is Not Obscurantist or Antirational

One may nevertheless wonder whether, despite the "objective prog-

If myths and other "institutions" are the products of so many ages

Is this an appropriate description of what happened in Germany

gerous flavor of atavism. In periods when rationality seems especially

what Blumenberg has described as "the striking nonsimultaneities in

The answer is twofold. First, as Blumenberg writes, "enlighten-

is all too ready to engage in destruction when it fails to recognize the

This is not a "counsel of despair" for rationality. It is simply the

6. Some Concrete Applications

the category of dogma as they emerge from and differentiate them-

it neither as a substitute for nor as unrelated to the conceptual work

7. "Bringing Myth to an End," and Human Autonomy