Your complimentary articles
You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please
If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.
To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.
If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.
Articles
That Shine of Heavenly Light
George Ross shows how Goethe’s masterpiece Faust explored the limits of human reason and foretold the catastrophes of the modern world.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was no philosopher, at least not in the conventional sense, for he produced no philosophical system, indeed, he never wrote a philosophical work as such. He was a philosopher if we regard as a philosopher anyone who takes as their guide the Socratic dictum ‘An unexamined life is not worth living’; but Goethe would have complemented this dictum by adding its reciprocal: ‘An unlived life is not worth examining’, for he lived his life to the full. He was a poet, a writer, a playwright, a scientist, a Cabinet minister in Weimar, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he also introduced far-reaching reforms, such as making divorce possible in Germany.
Faust was Goethe’s masterpiece. He devoted over sixty years to writing it, starting it when he was twenty.
…