Dämonisch, das Dämonische (Daemonic, the Daemonic)

Angus Nicholls
Queen Mary University of London

Due to their prominence in Goethe’s autobiography (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth) and in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe), Goethe scholarship has associated the lexemes dämonisch and das Dämonische with Goethe’s life, and especially with his seemingly divinely inspired artistic productivity. Yet when these lexemes are considered in relation to the ancient Greek term from which they are derived – δαíμων (German: Dämon; English: daimon or daemon) – they appear as part of a larger tradition in European thought that is concerned with non-rational sources of inspiration, as well as with the limits of reason itself.  Far from offering a consistent theory or concept of the daemonic, Goethe uses this term and its cognates in various ways: to refer to a mysterious and terrifying force that influences one’s life and seems to operate at the nexus between character and fate; as a poetic topos that depicts the relation between the striving subject and its external world; as the morphological core of the personality associated with the tradition of astrology, a core which is seen as the locus of one’s productivity; and as a name or placeholder for phenomena that escape our rational comprehension. Precisely due to the flexibility and ambiguity of these terms, Goethe’s use of them has enjoyed a rich reception in fields as various as theology, religious studies, and philosophy from the nineteenth century until the present.


 

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  1. Introduction
  2. Das Dämonische and the Relation Between Self and World
  3. The Theological Reception of Goethe on das Dämonische
  4. The Reception of Goethe on das Dämonische in Twentieth-Century Theory
  5. Notes
  6. Works Cited and Further Reading

Introduction

Goethe’s use of terms dämonisch (daemonic or demonic) and its substantivized form das Dämonische (the daemonic or demonic) has led to generations of scholarly debate and attempted conceptual definition, beginning with Goethe’s own retrospective discussions in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (1835; Conversations with Goethe), which added fuel to the interpretative fire, and extending to literary criticism of the late twentieth and even the early twenty-first centuries. The list of philosophically inclined Germanists who have tried their hand at offering a definitive interpretation of Goethe’s uses of these terms includes some seminal names, such as Friedrich Gundolf, Elsie Butler, Benno von Wiese, Walter Muschg, Eduard Spranger and Hugh Barr Nisbet, among many others.1

Alongside the importance of these terms for Goethe studies proper—and especially for a certain image of Goethe as a divinely-inspired genius, to be discussed below—a philosophical treatment of them must recognise their reception beyond the confines of Germanistik, in key figures from the fields of theology and religious studies (Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, and Karl Jaspers), as well as from philosophy and critical theory (Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Hans Blumenberg, among others). Extending beyond those philosophers who make explicit reference to Goethe’s ideas about things dämonisch, there exists a further category of thinkers and writers who use the terms Dämon and dämonisch in similar ways to Goethe, and who may have been influenced by him, albeit without mentioning his name. This list includes Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, and Thomas Mann, but could include many others.2 While direct lineages would be hard to prove in all these latter instances, a speculative case for Goethe’s general influence on how educated readers of German understood these terms could be made on the basis that the definitions of Dämon and dämonisch in the second volume of the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (1860; German Dictionary) both attribute their modern German usage to Goethe:

DÄMON, m. genius. der griechische δαíμων bezeichnet einen bösen sowol [sic] als einen guten geist, einen schutzgeist; dem christenthum gegenüber trat er in die dunkelheit und treibt die menschen, über die er macht hat, zum bösen. doch nehmen ihn einzelne wieder im sinne der alten, besonders GÖTHE.3
DÄMON, m. genius. The Greek δαíμων refers to an evil as well as to a good spirit, a tutelary spirit; for Christianity, by contrast, it steps over into darkness, and drives those over whom in has power into evil. But some have gone back to receiving this idea in the sense of the ancients, especially GÖTHE.

As the Grimms show, part of the reason for the broader philosophical interest in things dämonisch lies in the fact that Goethe drew attention to the origins of this idea in ancient Greek philosophy. The idea of the δαíμων (daimon, also daemon)—broadly conceived as a divinely determined aspect of one’s character, or as a kind of divine spirit or voice—can be found in sources spanning from Empedocles and Heraclitus, via Plato’s works and especially his depiction of Socrates and his ‘divine sign’ or daimonion, to various Stoic and Neo-Platonic sources.4 This idea was in turn prevalent in the late eighteenth-century discourses on the idea of genius as a form of divine, unconscious or non-rational inspiration, discourses to which Goethe was directly exposed through the influences of Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803).5

Keeping this broader intellectual history in mind, the remainder of this entry has a threefold structure. To begin with, part two will examine some of Goethe’s key references to Dämonen and things dämonisch, thereby revealing how this term is related to one of the key themes of German Idealism: the relation between the self or subject and its world, with the category ‘world’ also including God and gods. Here the focus will be on four main works: Book 20, Part Four of Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–33; Poetry and Truth), which was composed in 1813 and is the most frequently cited source; the sonnet “Mächtiges Überraschen” (1807–8; Powerful Astonishment); the cycle of poems “Urworte. Orphisch” (1817; Primal Words. Orphic) and their surrounding context in the volumes in which they first appeared (first in Zur Morphologie [1820; On Morphology]; and second, this time with a commentary by Goethe, in an issue of Über Kunst und Altertum [1820; On Art and Antiquity]); and, finally, the conversations with Goethe recorded and embellished by Eckermann during the late 1820s and the early 1830s.

In parts three and four, it will be proposed that it is precisely the non-conceptual imprecision of Goethe’s ideas about Dämonen and das Dämonische that made these notions amenable to their later theological (part three) and philosophical-theoretical adaptations (part four). Here the focus will largely be confined to thinkers who directly refer to these terms in their respective discussions of Dichtung und Wahrheit, “Urworte. Orphisch,” and Eckermann’s Gespräche. In relation to theology and religious studies, the key interpreters of Goethe on das Dämonische are Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, and Karl Jaspers. In the tradition of continental theory— on the very boundary between literature and philosophy—four thinkers deploy Goethe’s notion of das Dämonische to further their own theoretical ends: Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Hans Blumenberg.

Das Dämonische and the Relation Between Self and World

Alongside Eckermann’s Gespräche, Book 20, Part Four of Dichtung und Wahrheit constitutes the most prominent source on das Dämonische for the so-called Goethekult (Goethe cult) of the early twentieth century, exemplified by Gundolf’s Goethe monograph of 1916. Gundolf instructs us that das Dämonische is a “heimlich bildende Gewalt” (secret formative power) associated with the “Schicksal” (fate) of the greatest human beings, including Goethe (Goethe, 3). The deep relation posited by Gundolf between das Dämonische and Goethe’s personal fate is most obviously attributable to the term’s appearance as an autobiographical leitmotif in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Yet while a biographical approach to das Dämonische might be justifiable in terms of genre, its effect has also been to obscure the broader philosophical history of the term before Goethe. As Peter Sprengel has written in his commentary on Goethe’s most famous passage about das Dämonische,6 its function within the narrative of Dichtung und Wahrheit is that of an interpretative frame through which Goethe attempts to synthesize the tendencies of his final years in Frankfurt: his love for Lili Schönemann, his early artistic productions, and his decision to move to Weimar:

Man hat im Verlaufe dieses biographischen Vortrags umständlich gesehn, wie das Kind, der Knabe, der Jüngling sich auf verschiedenen Wegen dem Übersinnlichen zu nähern gesucht, erst mit Neigung nach einer natürlichen Religion hingeblickt, dann mit Liebe sich an eine positive festgeschlossen, ferner durch Zusammenziehung in sich selbst seine eignen Kräfte versucht und sich endlich dem allgemeinen Glauben freudig hingegeben. Als er in den Zwischenräumen dieser Regionen hin und wider wanderte, suchte, sich umsah, begegnete ihm manches was zu keiner von allen gehören mochte, und er glaubte mehr und mehr einzusehn, daß es besser sei den Gedanken von dem Ungeheuren, Unfaßlichen abzuwenden. Er glaubte in der Natur, der belebten und unbelebten, der beseelten und unbeseelten etwas zu entdecken, das sich nur in Widersprüchen manifestierte und deshalb unter keinen Begriff noch viel weniger unter ein Wort gefaßt werden könnte. Es war nicht göttlich, denn es schien unvernünftig, nicht menschlich, denn es hatte keinen Verstand, nicht teuflisch, denn es war wohltätig, nicht englisch, denn es ließ oft Schadenfreude merken. Es glich dem Zufall, denn es bewies keine Folge, es ähnelte der Vorsehung, denn es deutete auf Zusammenhang. Alles was uns begrenzt schien für dasselbe durchdringbar, es schien mit den notwendigen Elementen unsres Daseins willkürlich zu schalten, es zog die Zeit zusammen und dehnte den Raum aus. Nur im Unmöglichen schien es sich zu gefallen und das Mögliche mit Verachtung von sich zu stoßen. Dieses Wesen, das zwischen alle übrigen hineinzutreten, sie zu sondern, sie zu verbinden schien, nannte ich dämonisch nach dem Beispiel der Alten und derer die etwas Ähnliches gewahrt hatten. Ich suchte mich vor diesem furchtbaren Wesen zu retten, indem ich mich, nach meiner Gewohnheit, hinter ein Bild flüchtete. (FA 1.14:839–40)7
In the course of this biographical recital, we have seen in detail how the child, the boy, and the youth tried to approach the metaphysical by various paths, first affectionately looking to natural religion, then attaching himself lovingly to a positive one, next testing his own abilities by withdrawing into himself, and at last joyously yielding to the universal faith. While meandering in the spaces between these areas, seeking and looking about, he encountered some things that seemed to fit into none of these categories, and he became increasingly convinced that it was better to divert his thoughts from vast and incomprehensible subjects. He believed that he perceived something in nature (whether living or lifeless, animate or inanimate) that manifested itself only in contradictions and therefore could not be expressed in any concept, much less in any word. It was not divine for it seemed irrational; not human, for it had no intelligence; not diabolical, for it was beneficent; and not angelic, for it often betrayed malice. It was like chance, for it lacked continuity, and like Providence, for it suggested context. Everything that limits us seemed penetrable by it, and it appeared to dispose at will over the necessary elements of our existence, to contract time and expand space. It seemed only to accept the impossible and scornfully to reject the possible. This essence, which appeared to infiltrate all the others, separating and combining them, I called daemonic, after the example of the ancients and others who had perceived something similar. I tried to save myself from this terrible essence by taking refuge, as usual, behind an image.8

Here Goethe alludes to the workings of such a formative power upon his own life, a power which he describes as a “something” (etwas) or “essence” (Wesen), which seems “mit den notwendigen Elementen unseres Daseins willkürlich zu schalten” (to dispose at will over the necessary elements of our existence). Of note is Goethe’s claim that this essence cannot be fixed within any single “Begriff” (concept) because it manifests itself only in “Widersprüche” (contradictions). It is initially delimited by a series of negations: being described as not divine, not human, not diabolical, and not angelic; on the positive side, it is to be observed in the forces of nature, and it resembles “Zufall” (coincidence or chance), “Vorsehung” (providence), and a sense of “Zusammenhang” (order or context). It is also “furchtbar” (terrible), and so Goethe chooses to name it dämonisch “nach dem Beispiel der Alten” (after the example of the ancients) in an attempt to bring this force under some kind of semantic control: “Ich suchte mich vor diesem furchtbaren Wesen zu retten, indem ich mich, nach meiner Gewohnheit, hinter ein Bild flüchtete” (FA 1.14:839–40; I tried to save myself from this terrible essence by taking refuge, as usual, behind an image).

Later in Book 20, Part Four of Dichtung und Wahrheit, we also discover that the amoral force of das Dämonische is at its most terrible when manifested in a single human being. These individuals, according to Goethe, “üben eine unglaubliche Gewalt über alle Geschöpfe” (FA 1.14:841–42; exercise an unbelievable force over all creatures), in such a way that they can captivate the masses, and for this reason, they can only be overcome by the universe itself: “sie sind durch nichts zu überwinden als durch das Universum selbst.” From this Goethe derives the Latin saying (which appears to have been his own coinage), nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse (FA 1.14:841–42; no one can stand against God unless it is God himself).

These hyperbolic passages certainly pay little regard to conceptual precision, and function within several interdependent registers that can be described as biographical, aesthetic, theological, philosophical, and even political. As Jochen Schmidt’s two-volume study has shown,9 there is at least one other prominent word or concept which had a similarly multivalent aesthetic-political function in German during Goethe’s lifetime, namely that of genius (das Genie), and as the Grimms’ entry on Dämon notes, Goethe’s uses of the terms dämonisch and das Dämonische can usefully be interpreted by way of analogy with the idea of genius. When, for example, we examine the philosophical-cum-religious references to things dämonisch made by Goethe’s older contemporaries in Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder, we are quickly confronted with the genius debate in late eighteenth-century German thought, a debate that in turn exerted an influence upon the period which came to be known as the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress).

In his Kalligone (1799–1800), Herder associates the idea of the Greek notion of δαíμων with the “Himmlesgabe” (heavenly gift) of genius, while also relating it to a spirit located in nature (Naturgeist).10 Herder’s Spinoza-inspired vision of a nature that is permeated by divine forces (Kräfte)—forces that can manifest themselves in the affects (Affekte) of the poet before finally being harnessed by poetic language—saturates his aesthetic writings of the late 1760s and early 1770s, the period of his most formative influence on Goethe.11 And there is little doubt that Herder’s apprehension of things dämonisch was originally influenced by his important interlocutor on the theological dimensions of language—Hamann—whose bizarre and psychedelic treatise Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten (1759; Socratic Memorablia) places Socrates’s divine voice or Dämon (otherwise known as his daimonion, see Plato’s Apology, 31c–d) at the centre of an anti-rationalist vision of pietist Christianity.12 This heady mix of ideas formed part of the foundation of Goethe’s so-called Genie-Periode (genius period), and it is no coincidence that Book 20, Part Four of Dichtung und Wahrheit offers a kind of concluding summary of this phase, marking the turning point of Goethe’s move to Weimar in 1775.

Goethe’s self-conscious discourse on things dämonisch does not begin until after the period commonly referred to as Weimar Classicism (roughly 1786–1805) and incorporates some of this classicism’s key ideas. As is suggested by the quotations from Dichtung und Wahrheit above, the retrospective act of naming and addressing this phenomenon is presented as a way of coming to terms with it. In this way, that which was once overpoweringly inexplicable is at least given approachable contours. The problem itself, at least in its Storm and Stress iteration, relates to genius as a form of overweening and potentially pathological subjectivity; a transgressive loss of contact with aesthetic, epistemological and ultimately societal norms. Goethe’s early lyric poems—especially “Prometheus” (1773; Prometheus) but also “Mahomets Gesang” (1773; Song of Mohammed)—present the aesthetic dimensions of this problem in miniature, and its extended societal depiction can arguably be found in Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774/87; The Sorrows of Young Werther) and in both parts of Faust (1806, 1832).

One ancient sense of the term δαíμων is the idea of an intermediary between the divine and human worlds (see, for example, Plato’s Symposium, 202d–303a), and in both “Prometheus” and “Mahomets Gesang” we are presented with subjects who wish to encounter and even vie with divine forces. The protagonist of “Prometheus” desires to compete with and ultimately to displace God’s position as creator: see his transgressive challenge to Zeus: “hier sitz ich, forme Menschen / Nach meinem Bilde” (FA 1.1:204; here I sit, form humans / After my image). Similarly, the gushing poetic stream of “Mahomets Gesang”—conspicuously named after the religious prophet—eventually merges itself with its father, the ocean, after having named and fertilized the lands through which it and its brothers have passed. Both poems can be read as depicting juvenile and hyper-masculine acts of self-assertion associated with crises of identity: while Prometheus’s fragile sense of autonomy seems to be completely dependent upon his scathing rejection of Zeus, “Mahomets Gesang” ends with a failure to attain individuation on the part of its protagonist, who resorts to merging himself with the Father. In both poems, the philosophical question of the relation between self and world is at stake. Is the Zeus of “Prometheus” an external creator-God, or merely the figment of Prometheus’s fearful and disoriented mind when he turns his eyes towards the sun? And does the stream of “Mahomets Gesang” not end up surrendering its own identity by fearfully fleeing the desert and sun by which it and its kin believe themselves to be threatened, thereby regressing to parental protection? In terms of the self-world relation, these poems could be read as inverted images of one another: in the first, the subject negates its real or imagined father by raising himself to the absolute, egoistically appointing himself creator of his own race; while in the second, the subject negates itself in an act of total submission to his creator. Both positions are extremes, and neither text depicts what might be regarded as a balanced sense of adult identity.

One of Goethe’s earliest and most decisive usages of the term dämonisch can be read as a classical or post-classical (and in Goethe’s terms: healthy) answer to this problem of an unbalanced relation between self and world, especially as it is posed in “Mahomets Gesang.” The sonnet “Mächtiges Überraschen” has been viewed as a sequel to “Mahomets Gesang” in that it reprises the same topos for genius found in the earlier poem, but this time from within the restrictions of the sonnet form.13 The image of a stream raging down a mountain has functioned as a metaphor for poetic creativity at least since Horace,14 and it reappears in part two of Faust, when that play’s protagonist compares himself to a “Wassersturz” (waterfall or cataract) that has stormed “von Fels zu Felsen [. . .] / Begierig wütend nach dem Abgrund zu” (FA 1.7/1:144; from rock to rock [. . .] / with eager fury towards the abyss). In the version presented in “Mächtiges Überraschen,” a stream emerges from a vault of rocks in its urge to unify itself with the ocean, but is halted by Oreas, a mythological mountain nymph. In the poem’s second stanza, the moment at which this gushing subjectivity is impeded by Oreas is described as dämonisch:

Dämonisch aber stürzt mit einem Male –
Ihr folgen Berg und Wald in Wirbelwinden –
Sich Oreas, behagen dort zu finden,
Und hemmt den Lauf, begrenzt die weite Schale. (FA 1.2:250)
But with sudden daemonic force –
Followed in whirlwinds by mountain and forest –
Oreas tumbles, there to find contentment,
And limits the flow, restricts the wide bowl.

This daemonic moment functions as the turning-point of the poem, since the subject-stream is then dammed into a lake which serenely mirrors the constellations, and which positively represents a “ein neues Leben” (FA 1.2:250; a new life).

Whereas the earlier two poems focus on either the would-be limitless expansion of the subject into a God (“Prometheus”), or on the subject’s boundaries being dissolved within a greater pantheistic sense of the divine (“Mahomets Gesang”), “Mächtiges Überraschen” is a case-study of subjectivity forced into a healthy sense limitation by mythological and inexplicable forces described as dämonisch. It is left unclear whether these forces are internal or external to the subject, and this is precisely because das Dämonische turns upon the very relation between subject and object, between self and world.

This classical sense of subjectivity-in-limitation is then reinforced in the poem cycle “Urworte. Orphisch,” (Primal Words. Orphic) written in 1817 and published in the volume Zur Morphologie (On Morphology) in 1820. The first section of Goethe’s poem is entitled “Δαιμων, Dämon,” and describes this idea in Orphic terms as the divinely decreed “Gesetz” (law) that presides over the individual’s birth and which regulates its development, while also being worked on (“geprägt”) by external forces: it is the “geprägte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt” (FA 1.20:492; imprinted form that, in living, develops itself). The key source here seems to be Heraclitus’s idea of the δαíμων as representing the nexus between fate and character (see no. 119 of the Fragments), but in the accompanying commentary to the poem published in Über Kunst und Altertum, Goethe also mentions Socrates’s divine sign or daimionion (he calls it simply a Dämon), which he sees as representing a necessary “individuality” ascribed to each person (“nothwendig aufgestellte Individualität,” FA 1.20:494). Goethe then ameliorates this sense of hard determinism in four further sections of poem, which focus respectively on the formative principles of Tyche (Das Zufällige, coincidence or chance), Eros (Liebe, romantic love), Ananke (Nötigung, external necessity) and Elpis (Hoffnung, hope), all of which are seen to interact with the Dämon in the life of the individual.

The publication of “Urworte. Orphisch” in Zur Morphologie, alongside another naturalistic poem of development entitled “Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen” (1798/99; The Metamorphosis of Plants), brings das Dämonische into proximity with Goethe’s natural scientific writings. Both poems invoke the idea that every organism or individual develops according to an internal law (in the latter poem this is referred to as a “secret law” or geheimes Gesetz, MA 12:74–75), which, far from being a static Platonic form, is a generative principle of development that unfolds in time and is worked upon by external forces, in line with Goethe’s general idea of morphology as a “Verwandlungslehre” (theory of transformation).15

Here the main classical source seems to be Aristotle’s idea of entelechy (entelecheia), meaning “actuality.” An entelecheia is the “completed actuality” of something—for example, a sculpture may be the completed actuality of a block of marble—and is understood in combination with the idea of dunamis, the capacity of something to change (Aristotle, De Anima, II.i, 412b). Translated literally, entelecheia means having the end or goal (telos) within,16 which resonates with the idea of the Dämon as a determining form or core (Kern) that develops through life. The connection between these two terms—Dämon and entelechy—is not explicitly made in Zur Morphologie or Über Kunst und Altertum, but Goethe goes on to directly associate them in his conversations with Eckermann.

The decisive contribution of Eckermann to our understanding of, or perhaps our confusion about, das Dämonische is that it brings the five registers mentioned earlier—biography, aesthetics, theology, philosophy, politics—into an often bewildering and at times burlesque interaction, which again pays little heed to conceptual clarity. This occurs in the most decisive conversation—dated March 11, 1828—where Goethe associates the artistic productivity of his youth with das Dämonische, since “jede Produktivität höchster Art [. . .] ist dem Dämonischen verwandt” (FA 2.12:656–57; every productivity of the highest order [. . .] is related to the daemonic). Here Goethe draws upon the ancient Greek idea of divine inspiration, by describing the individual as a mere “Gefäß” (receptacle) of divine influence, and the genial aspects of the personality are, he claims, directly related to the strength of one’s Entelechie (FA 2.12: 656–57).

Later in this conversation, Goethe associates this idea of the daemonic genius with Napoleon, in line with the premise that “jeder außerordentliche Mensch hat eine gewisse Sendung, die er zu vollführen berufen ist” (FA 2.12:660; every exceptional human being has a certain mission that he is called upon to complete). Of interest here is the fact that once this mission is completed, apparently external Dämonen may impede such individuals: “so stellen ihm die Dämonen ein Bein nach dem andern, bis er zuletzt unterliegt. So ging es Napoleon und vielen Anderen” (FA 2.12:660; in this way the daemons trip him up one leg after the other, until he succumbs. So it was for Napoleon and many others).

This statement sets up an implied dualism between the apparently inborn Dämon of the extraordinary individual such as Napoleon—in other words, his or her powerful entelechy—and the seemingly external daemons that may eventually bring such over-ambitious individuals undone. This can in turn be related back to the productively obstructing figure of Oreas in “Mächtiges Überraschen,” and to the idea, found in the Latin saying from Dichtung und Wahrheit, that in politics, the daemonic individual may ultimately be overcome by the universe itself (FA 1.14:841–42). Once again, therefore, the relation between self and world seems to be the presiding question addressed in Goethe’s statements on das Dämonische. Notably, however, Goethe is at pains to put his own personality at a distance from the dangers of the daemonic. On March 2, 1831, he says to Eckermann, “Das Dämonische [. . .] ist dasjenige, was durch Verstand und Vernunft nicht aufzulösen ist. In meiner Natur liegt es nicht, aber ich bin ihm unterworfen” (FA 2.12:455; The daemonic is that which cannot be resolved through understanding or reason. It does not lie in my nature, but I am subject to it). This cryptic and highly rhetorical distinction—which, as we shall see, is of great interest to Hans Blumenberg—seems to imply that although the daemonic may be related to Goethe’s artistic productivity, it does not define his character to the same extent as in the case of Napoleon.

The Theological Reception of Goethe on das Dämonische

The entry under Dämon in the Grimms’ Deutsches Wörterbuch demonstrates that the Greek idea of the δαíμων and its entire polytheistic context were increasingly rejected by the Judeo-Christian tradition, which tended to interpret daemons—generally understood as morally neutral or ambivalent tutelary spirits in the classical sense—as heretical demons by whom one might become possessed.17 Here it is important to note that in German there is no distinction between daemon and demon, with the words Dämon and dämonisch conjuring resonances that are potentially both ancient Greek and Judeo-Christian. Important Christian thinkers and scholars of religion—the most influential of whom are Søren Kierkegaard, Rudolf Otto, Paul Tillich, and Karl Jaspers—make this ambiguity a point of focus in their respective discussions of the term, often drawing directly on Goethe.

Kierkegaard—who does not reference Goethe directly, but who is important for Otto and Tillich—offers a theological exploration of things dämonisch in Begrebet Angest (1844; The Concept of Anxiety). Here das Dämonische (det dæmoniske) designates a sense of “anxiety about the good” and an “unfree relation to the good” which accompanies sin. The daemonic in Kierkegaard cannot be directly defined or communicated, because it is always “the reserved and the involuntarily disclosed.” This is because the person who seeks to communicate the daemonic would always themselves be suspected of being daemonic, meaning “in the bondage of sin,” in a state of anxiety about the good, and therefore unreliable.18

In Das Heilige (1917; The Idea of the Holy) the Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto associates das Dämonische with the “bedeutende Rolle” (important role) played by “die lebendig geübte Divination” (divination, practised in a lively way) in Goethe’s life. Directly referencing the passages on das Dämonische in Dichtung und Wahrheit and in Eckermann’s Gespräche, Otto frames das Dämonische within his notion that the divine or numinous is an a priori category of human experience, roughly in the manner of Kant’s philosophy of the a priori. For Otto, the daemonic is “das ganz Irrationale, durch Begriff Unerfaßliche, das Mysteriöse” (the completely irrational, that which cannot be grasped through concepts, the mysterious).19

In 1926, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich published two essays on das Dämonische, both of which reference Goethe and extend his usages of the term. In “Der Begriff des Dämonischen und seine Bedeutung für die systematische Theologie” (1926; The Concept of the Daemonic and its Significance for Systematic Theology), Tillich claims that, far from being merely associated with a “Sündenlehre” or theory of sin, das Dämonische must be regarded as a central concept in the philosophy of religion.20 In this, Tillich follows Goethe’s own important remark in Dichtung und Wahrheit that das Dämonische is “nicht teuflisch” (FA 1.14:840; not devilish). Indeed, for Tillich, “Der Widerspruch gegen den unbedingten Anspruch des Heiligen ist also selbst getragen vom Heiligen, ist ‘heiliges Widergöttliches,’ d. h. Dämonisches” (Tillich, “Der Begriff,” 286; The opposition to the unconditional claim of the holy is itself produced by the holy, it is the holy anti-divine, that is, the daemonic). For Tillich, to posit the holy is at the same time to posit its opposing principle, the daemonic. This opposing principle is not to be regarded as merely negative or destructive, but also as creative: “Und so hat der Sprachgebrauch z.B. bei Sokrates, Plato, Goethe u. a. den Dämon zum Schicksalsträger oder das Dämonische zur genial-produktiven Kraft werden lassen” (286–287; and so, for example, the usage by Socrates, Plato, and Goethe, among others, allowed the daemon to become a carrier of fate, or the daemonic to become a genial and productive power).

In a second extended essay, published as a stand-alone book in 1926 under the title of Das Dämonische: Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte (The Daemonic: A Contribution to the Interpretation of Meaning in History), Tillich regards das Dämonische as a contradictory phenomenon, uniting within itself “ein gestaltendes und gestaltzerstörendes Element” (a form-creating and a form-destroying element).21 Tillich points out that, owing to its form-giving power, the daemonic cannot simply be equated with the Satanic, which is purely negative and destructive. Rather, the Satanic represents only the negative and destructive principle within the daemonic, which stands in dialectical tension with its equally important creative potential (Das Dämonische, 8–9). On the level of individual psychology, and writing under the influence of Freud, Tillich associates the idea of the daemonic with “Besessenheit” (possession), and with an “Einbruch” (incursion) into the centre of the human personality that emerges from the unconscious (15). This dialectical relation between creation and destruction also plays itself out in the history of religion itself; according to Tillich, religions both emerge from daemonic forces and refine themselves in their battles with them (24).

Investigating the daemonic from the more secular perspective of the psychology of religion, Karl Jaspers, in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919; Psychology of Worldviews), sees the belief in daemonic forces as corresponding to mythological beliefs found in so-called ‘primitive’ societies. For Jaspers, such beliefs are pre-logical and pre-conceptual, inhering in the images and narratives that belong to what he calls the “mythologisch-dämonisches Weltbild” (mythological-daemonic world-picture). But for Jaspers, the daemonic is not confined to ancient or purportedly primitive societies. In support of his claim that the daemonic is a mythological force that exceeds the boundaries of modern rationality, Jaspers refers to Goethe’s discussions of the term in Dichtung und Wahrheit, arguing that Goethe saw the daemonic as both a productive and a destabilising element in his experience.22

The Reception of Goethe on das Dämonische in Twentieth-Century Theory

As a recent study by Kirk Wetters has shown,23 in German-speaking Europe, philosophical and literary interest in things daemonic underwent a resurgence during the period around the First World War and the early stages of the Weimar Republic. Goethe’s statements in Dichtung und Wahrheit about a cryptic, contradictory, and terrifying force at work in nature, in his own biography, and in politics, seemed to resonate with a generation of thinkers—chief among them Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin—who were confronted with the horrors of the Great War and with the seemingly impossible task of re-establishing meaning and order in its wake.

Elaborated in his Theorie des Romans (1920; Theory of the Novel), Lukács’s theory of the daemonic follows directly from Goethe’s insofar as it also emphasises the relation between self and world, but with a modernist twist: far from being brought into alignment with one another, the modern age brings self and world into a relation of violent discordance. In Lukács’s modernist context, this relation is manifested as a longing for meaning that emerges from the disoriented subject, hero, or genius of the novel in an epoch from which the gods have decisively disappeared. The backdrop to the book is formed by Lukács’s understanding of the difference between antiquity and modernity, a preoccupation that he inherits from the classicism of Goethe and especially from Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) essay “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” (1795; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry). Already in Die Seele und die Formen (1911; Soul and Form; German edition published in 1911, originally published in a shorter Hungarian edition in 1910), Lukács presents a version of classical thought that has been refracted by his modernist lens and by Kierkegaard’s proto-existentialist depiction of Socrates in The Concept of Irony (1841).24 In modernity, according to Lukács in the essay “Sehnsucht und Form” (Longing and Form), the quest for Plato’s forms has become entirely fruitless and unrequited, and Socrates is said by the young Lukács ironically to emphasise the “Hoffnungslosigkeit aller Sehnsucht” (hopelessness of all longing).25 The daemonic individual is thus, for Lukács, the hero who recognises this hopelessness, but who ironically keeps striving for meaning despite it, and the novel is the aesthetic form in which this striving is depicted.

In Theorie des Romans, Lukács’s main point of contrast is between the epic and the novel. In the age of the epic, the “Seele [. . .] weiß noch nicht, daß sie sich verlieren kann” (soul does not yet know that it can lose itself), divinity is “bekannt und nahe” (familiar and close), and “es kommt nur darauf an, in ihr [d. h. die Welt] den Einem zubestimmten Ort zu finden” (all that is necessary is to find the locus that has been predestined for each individual).26 While the world of the epic is represented as a closed and homogenous totality whose order simply has to be unveiled by the protagonist, the world of the novel is, by contrast, radically heterogenous, open and fragmented. The novel is both the “Epopöe eines Zeitalters, für das die extensive Totalität des Lebens nicht mehr sinnfällig gegeben ist” (Theorie des Romans, 43; the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given) and the “Epopöe der gottverlassenen Welt” (58; epic of a world that has been abandoned by God).27 Its primary condition is thus one of “transzendentale Obdachlosigkeit” (40; transcendental homelessness) and the “Psychologie des Romanhelden ist das Wirksamkeitsgebiet des Dämonischen” (70; novel hero’s psychology is the field of action of the daemonic).28

Cast out of the world of pre-given meaning, the daemonic protagonist experiences “eine Sehnsucht der Seele, wo der Heimatsdrang so heftig ist, daß die Seele den ersten Pfad, der heimzuführen scheint, in blindem Ungestüm betreten muß” (68; longing for home so violent that the soul must, with blind impetuousness, take the first path that seems to lead there).29 This daemonic hero is subject to a kind of ironic double consciousness: knowing that “der Sinn die Wirklichkeit niemals ganz zu durchdringen vermag, daß aber diese ohne ihn ins Nichts der Wesenlosigkeit zerfallen würde” (68; meaning can never quite penetrate reality, but that, without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality).30 Lukács’s theory of the daemonic is thus in direct dialogue not only with Goethe but also—especially when viewed within the broader context of his early works that includes Die Seele und die Formen—with Plato: the daemonic protagonist still attempts to mediate between empirical experience and the meaning-giving power of transcendent form, yet realises that this classically framed quest cannot be fulfilled in a post-classical age.

This belated sense of the post-classical also characterises Walter Benjamin’s 1924 essay “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften” (Goethe’s Elective Affinities), in which he briefly sketches a theory of the daemonic in Goethe’s works that aligns this term with what he calls “die Astrologie als den Kanon des mythischen Denkens” (astrology as the canon of mythic thinking).31 The title of Goethe’s novel Die Wahlerwandtschaften (1809; The Elective Affinities), which is borrowed from contemporary chemistry, explicitly compares the text’s contrived plot situation to a chemical experiment in which certain elements may display either attraction to or repulsion from one another. The implicit question posed by the novel is thus that of the relation between modern science and the classical idea of fate.

This relationship between literature, the natural sciences and classicism forms just one line of argument in Benjamin’s complex essay, and it is this line that leads to Benjamin’s take on das Dämonische. Benjamin situates Goethe’s natural scientific research in the context of post-Kantian thought, underlining as its central concern the relationship between empirical phenomena—such as, for example, individual plants—and the intuition of generic ideas or archetypes (Urphänomene or “primordial phenomena”) which may provide a more general key to interpreting such phenomena scientifically. One prominent example of such a proposed archetype was Goethe’s idea of the Urpflanze or “primal plant,” which he initially seems to have imagined could be found on a hillside in Italy, but which was later referred to by Schiller as an idea—in the Kantian sense of a rational concept derived from a series of empirical experiences—when Goethe revealed this theory to him in a meeting in 1794.32

With this post-Kantian background in mind, Benjamin writes that Goethe’s concept of nature is shot through with a deep sense of duality or ambiguity (“Doppelsinn”), referring on the one hand to a collection of perceivable empirical objects, and on the other to Urbilder or “primordial images” that are only available to the mind via the powers of intuition. According to Benjamin, Goethe was never successful in synthesising his empirical experiences with these general archetypes or “Urphänomene” (primordial phenomena), because such archetypes are available only in the form of intuition, which can in turn only be perceived within the non-rational realm of art (Benjamin 147).33

It is this unbridgeable abyss between sensuous nature and abstract intuitions that Benjamin refers to as Goethe’s “Erfahrung unfaßbarer Naturzweideutigkeit” (experience of the incomprehensible ambivalence in nature), an experience that “begleitet Goethes Anschauung sein Leben lang” (accompanies Goethe’s vision all his life), and which corresponds with his idea of the daemonic (150).34 Goethe’s late elaboration of a theory of morphology that invokes classical astrology—as seen in the poem cycle “Urworte. Orphisch” discussed above—thus represents for Benjamin the ultimate coincidence between the daemonic and what he describes as “mythisches Denken” (mythical thought). In Benjamin’s view, the daemonic—here consigned to the category of myth—is thus invoked by Goethe when science fails to establish a nexus between individual phenomena and their Urphänomene, and in Goethe’s novel it corresponds with the extra-scientific conception of fate associated with astrology (150).35 Here the association made by Benjamin between Goethe’s notion of the Urphänomen and his idea of das Dämonische is by no means an arbitrary one; support for it can be found in a letter written by Goethe to Hegel, in which he refers to the Urphänomene as “dämonische Wesen” (FA 2.9:164; daemonic essences).

In a recent and minor work (2015; L’avventura; translated as The Adventure, 2018), Giorgio Agamben closely follows, and builds upon, Benjamin’s analysis of the daemonic in “Urworte. Orphisch.” The “cult of the demon,” according to Agamben, is a “superstition to which Goethe devoted his life [. . .] a sort of Creed, where astrology and science merge).36 In an analysis devoid of irony, Agamben offers the reader the high drama of a Goethe who, faced with a choice between the various Urworte outlined in that poem—Daimon, Tyche, Eros, Ananke and Elpis—decides exclusively in favor of the Daimon. For Agamben this choice

also clarifies the poet’s guiding strategy; inscribing his own existence into a demonic constellation, he intended to distance it from every ethical judgement [. . .] The demon with whom Goethe made an informal deal, one that is yet no less firm than Faust’s, is the ambiguous power that guarantees success to the individual on condition of renouncing every ethical decision. It is thanks to this pact that Goethe could fashion his life as if the most insignificant episode or the most casual maxim showed the demonic signature that sanctioned its inevitable outcome. (Adventure, 13–14)

With Agamben we return to a biographical reading of das Dämonische in which Goethe’s authorial intention and personal worldview are conflated not only with his poetic statements, but also with the moral trajectory of one of his characters: Faust.

A rather more sceptical take on Goethe’s ideas about das Dämonische is offered by Hans Blumenberg in Arbeit am Mythos (1979; Work on Myth). Here Goethe’s thoughts on this subject are placed at the center of the most influential theory of myth to have emerged from post-war German thought.37 For Blumenberg, Goethe’s discourses on the daemonic serve to sum up the function of myth: that of providing anxious human beings with orientation and existential consolation by taking refuge or fleeing behind an image, to paraphrase Goethe’s words in Dichtung und Wahrheit.38 For Blumenberg, Goethe’s taking flight (Flucht) is explicitly not the “Flucht in die ‘Logoi’” (flight into the ‘Logoi’) taken by Socrates, the philosopher; rather it is “Flucht hinter ein Bild” (flight behind an image). Indeed, “Philosoph ist Goethe gerade deshalb nicht, weil er hinter das Bild flieht” (Arbeit am Mythos, 437; Goethe is therefore precisely not a philosopher, because he flees behind the image).39 It is therefore of no little consequence for a Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts that Blumenberg associates das Dämonische with what he elsewhere calls Unbegrifflichkeit (non-conceptuality): phenomena that fall below the thresholds of clarity and distinctness required by philosophical concepts, but which nevertheless need to be named for the purposes of orientation.40

Addressing Goethe’s notion of das Dämonische, while also seemingly paraphrasing the foreword (Vorrede) to the A-edition of Kant’s Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781; Critique of Pure Reason), Blumenberg observes:

Niemals ist präziser ausgesprochen worden, weshalb sich die Vernunft Bedürfnisse zugesteht, die sie selbst erweckt, ohne sie in ihrer regulären Disziplin erfüllen zu können. (Arbeit am Mythos, 437)
Never has it been articulated more precisely why reason admits needs, which it arouses itself, without being able, in its regular discipline, to satisfy them.41

The term daemonic therefore performs the compensatory function of merely giving a name to what Blumenberg calls “der ungelöste Rest” (the unresolved remainder) of Goethe’s experience. The daemonic thus “gehört der Kategorie des Mythischen an” (437; belongs to the category of the mythical) because it gives a name to, and therefore provides the subject with some measure of orientation towards, an “unaufgelöste historische Potenz” (559; an unresolved historical potency).42 Strictly speaking, for Blumenberg, there is no such thing as the daemonic; it is simply a word, consistently used by Goethe, to refer to various aspects of his experience that escape rational conceptualization. Blumenberg’s de-mythologising take on the daemonic thus displays an extreme nominalism and pragmatism redolent of the thought of William James, showing little interest in the etymology or intellectual history of the term before Goethe, and instead focusing on its synchronic function within certain passages or speech acts.

One of these speech acts is the aforementioned episode in Eckermann dated March 2, 1831, where Goethe claims that although the daemonic has influenced his life, unlike in the case of Napoleon, it does not lie in his nature (“in meiner Natur liegt es nicht, aber ich bin ihm unterworfen” [FA 2.12:455]). Here the name of the daemonic is seen by Blumenberg as a rhetorical tool, allowing Goethe to share in Napoleon’s divine inspiration on the one hand, while also protecting his own identity from the threats of immorality and disaster on the other: “Den Namen des dämonischen Dämon gebraucht er [. . .] gleichsam versetzt: für das Geschick des anderen, während er ihn auf sich gerade bezogen hatte” (Arbeit am Mythos, 518; He uses the name of the ‘daemon’ [. . .] in a quasi-displaced manner: for the other person’s fate, when he had just related it to himself).43 Goethe’s apparent self-distancing from the daemonic is thus an attempt at moral self-preservation, an interpretation that stands in tension with Agamben’s more one-dimensional portrait of a ‘demonic’ and Faustian Goethe.

Another such speech act is the Latin saying that Goethe attached to the daemonic: nemo contra deum nisi deus ipse: “no one (can stand) against God unless it is God himself.” In the Federal Republic of Germany of the 1970s, this overdetermined saying became the subject of a debate between Blumenberg—who was a Holocaust survivor—and Carl Schmitt, one of the most prominent constitutional theorists under National Socialism.44 Schmitt offered a “Christological” interpretation of Goethe’s saying, according to which it approximates the differentiation between the Father and the Son in Christian theology.45 Blumenberg in turn opposed Schmitt’s interpretation—and by extension his so-called “political theology”—by arguing that it expresses one of the key structural characteristics of myth: the avoidance of absolutism through the “division of powers” (Gewaltenteilung) amongst many gods (Arbeit am Mythos, 576–577).46 While Goethe seems to have applied this saying to Napoleon and to other daemonic leaders who eventually summoned up the daemons that defeated them, Blumenberg suggests that Goethe’s words would have offered a “heimlicher Trost” (secret comfort) to those Germans who had witnessed Hitler’s disastrous attempt to outdo Napoleon during the German campaign on the eastern front in 1941–42 (578).47 This debate between two prominent thinkers demonstrates how Goethe’s statements on the daemonic could retain their aesthetic and political potency in Germany well into the twentieth century.

Portions of this article are derived from my entry on “Daemonic” for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. I thank the Encyclopedia’s editors and Oxford University Press for permission to reproduce that material.

  1. See Friedrich Gundolf, Goethe (Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920 [1916]); E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1935); Benno von Wiese, Das Dämonische in Goethes Weltbild und Dichtung (Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1949), 13; “Goethes Glaube an das Dämonische,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 32 (1958): 321–44; Eduard Spranger, Goethe: Seine geistige Welt (Tübingen: Hermann Leins, 1967); H. B. Nisbet, “Das Dämonische: On the Logic of Goethe’s Demonology,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 7 (1971): 259–81. For a further discussion of the secondary literature, see Angus Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006), 4–10. See also, most recently, Kirk Wetters, Demonic History from Goethe to the Present (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2014), to be discussed further below. ↩
  2. Kierkegaard’s theorization of das Dämonische is discussed below; Stefan Zweig, Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (Leipzig: Insel, 1928); Freud discusses the term dämonisch in his essay on “Das Unheimliche” (1919; The Uncanny) and in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920; Beyond the Pleasure Principle). Thomas Mann, “Deutschland und die Deutschen,” in Essays, vol. 5, 1938-1945, eds. Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), 260–81, here 276. For further twentieth-century authors on das Dämonische, see Wetters, Demonic History. ↩
  3. Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1860), 713–14. ↩
  4. See for example, Empedocles, The Extant Fragments, ed. and trans. M. R. Wright (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981), 270; Heraclitus, Fragments, trans. T. M. Robinson (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987), 69 (fragment 119); Plato, Symposium 202d–303a, Apology 31c–d, Timaeus, 90a–d; Posidonius, Posidonius, ed. and trans. L. Edelstein and I.G. Kidd, vol. 2, The Commentary, Fragments 150–293 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988), 675 (fragment 187); Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, ed. and trans. A. S. L. Farquarson, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1944), 1:91–93; Plutarch, “On Socrates’s Personal Deity,” in Essays, trans. Robin Waterfield (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 294–358. For a narrative overview of these sources, see Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 32–76. ↩
  5. For an overview of the intellectual history, see Christos Axelos, “Das Dämonische,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, Gottfried Gabriel, et. al., 12 vols. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2004), 2:4–5. On Hamann and Herder and das Dämonische, see Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 77–105. ↩
  6. See Sprengel’s commentary in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, eds. Karl Richter, Herbert G. Göpfert, Norbert Miller, and Gerhard Sauder, 21 vols. (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985–98), 16:1073. Hereafter cited as MA in the body of the text. ↩
  7. Unless otherwise noted, works by Goethe are cited according to the Frankfurt edition (FA): Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987-2013). Hereafter cited as FA in the body of the text. ↩
  8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, From My Life: Poetry and Truth, vol. 5 of Goethe’s Collected Works, eds. Thomas Saine and Jeffrey Sammons, trans. Robert R. Heitner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987), 596–97 (translation altered). ↩
  9. Jochen Schmidt, Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750–1945, 2 vols. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985). ↩
  10. Johann Gottfried Herder, Kalligone, in Werke, eds. Günter Arnold, Martin Bollacher, et. al., 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000), 8:835. ↩
  11. See, in particular, Herder’s Fragmente einer Abhandlung über die Ode (1765), Über die neuere deutsche Literature. Fragmente (1765–67), and Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache (1772), all discussed in Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 89–105. ↩
  12. Johann Georg Hamann, Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary, trans. James C. O’Flaherty (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967 [1759]), especially 170. ↩
  13. See Ernst Loeb, Die Symbolik des Wasserzyklus bei Goethe (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967); Nicholls, Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic, 213–25. ↩
  14. Horace, The Odes and the Centennial Hymn, trans. James Michie (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1963), 187. ↩
  15. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe, eds. Gustav von Loeper, Erich Schmidt, et al., 4 parts, 133 vols. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887–1919), 2.6:446. ↩
  16. Wilfried Franzen, Konstantin. Georgulis, and Herbert. M. Nobis, “Entelechie,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, eds. Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, Gottfried Gabriel, et. al., 12 vols. (Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2004), 2: 506–509. ↩
  17. See, for example Werner Foerster’s entry under δαíμων (daemon) in Gerhard Kittel and Gerhard Friedrich, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. and trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans, 1964), 2:1–20. ↩
  18. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin, ed. and trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Norton, 2014), 143–44, 149 (emphasis in the original). See also Peter Fenves, “Kierkegaard and the Definition of the Demonic,” in Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe, eds. Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen and Kirk Wetters (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 193–200. ↩
  19. Rudolf Otto, Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, 4th ed. (Breslau: Trewendt und Garnier, 1920 [1917]), 135–36, here 179. For Otto’s account of the daemonic in Goethe, see Das Heilige, 177–83. ↩
  20. Paul Tillich, “Der Begriff des Dämonischen und seine Bedeutung für die systematische Theologie,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, Offenbarung und Glaube. Schriften zur Theologie II, ed. Renate Albrecht (Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1970), 285–91, especially 285. ↩
  21. Paul Tillich, Das Dämonische. Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1926), 8. On Tillich, see also Das Dämonische: Kontextuelle Studien zu einer Schlüsselkategorie Paul Tillichs, eds. Christian Danz and Werner Schüßler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018). ↩
  22. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1919), 166–72. ↩
  23. Wetters, Demonic History. ↩
  24. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna N. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989), 45–46. ↩
  25. Georg Lukács, Die Seele und die Formen (Berlin: Egon Fleischl, 1911), 202; Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1974), 93. ↩
  26. Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans, eds. Frank Benseler and Rüdiger Dannemann (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2009 [1920]), 22, 24; The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock (London: Merlin Press, 1971), 12. Hereafter cited as Theorie des Romans in German and Theory of the Novel in English. ↩
  27. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 56, 88. ↩
  28. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 40, 90. ↩
  29. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 87–88. ↩
  30. Ibid. ↩
  31. Walter Benjamin, “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 123–202, here 150. English translation: Walter Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913-1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Stanley Corngold (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), 297–360, here 316–17. ↩
  32. See Goethe to Johann Gottfried Herder on April 17, 1787, FA 1.15/1:286; Goethe’s account of this meeting is found in the text “Glückliches Ereignis” (Fortunate Encounter), in FA 1.24:436–7. ↩
  33. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 314. ↩
  34. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 316. ↩
  35. Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” 316–317. ↩
  36. Giorgio Agamben, The Adventure, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 5, 7. ↩
  37. For an overview, see Angus Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 166–69; Angus Nicholls, “The Goethe Complex: Hans Blumenberg on Das Dämonische,” in Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe, eds. Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen and Kirk Wetters (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 97–119. ↩
  38. Hans Blumenberg, Arbeit am Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 437. All translations from Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), here 401. ↩
  39. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 401 (translation altered). ↩
  40. See Blumenberg’s Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit (Theory of Non-Conceptuality), published from the Nachlass in 2007, but written in the mid-1970s, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007). ↩
  41. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 401. ↩
  42. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 401, 515. ↩
  43. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 477 (translation altered). ↩
  44. For an overview of this debate, which extended across published works by Blumenberg and Schmitt as well as their posthumously published correspondence, see Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences, 205–10. ↩
  45. Carl Schmitt, Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder politischen Theologie (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970), 123. Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology, trans. Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 127. ↩
  46. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 531. ↩
  47. Blumenberg, Work on Myth, 531. ↩

Works Cited and Further Reading

  • Agamben, Giorgio. The Adventure. Translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.
  • Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Translated and edited by A. S. L. Farquarson. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1944.
  • Axelos, Christos. “Das Dämonische.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer, Gottfried Gabriel, et. al. 12 vols. Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2004.
  • Benjamin, Walter. “Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.1. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 123–202. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974.
  • ———. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.” In Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Translated by Stanley Corngold, 297–360. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996.
  • Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979.
  • ———. Work on Myth. Translated by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1985.
  • ———. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit. Edited by Anselm Haverkamp. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007.
  • Butler, E. M. The Tyranny of Greece Over Germany. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1935.
  • Danz, Christian and Werner Schüßler. Das Dämonische: Kontextuelle Studien zu einer Schlüsselkategorie Paul Tillichs. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018.
  • Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Edited by Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften and Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen. 33 vols. Leipzig and Munich: S. Hirzel and Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1854–1972.
  • Empedocles. The Extant Fragments. Translated and edited by M. R. Wright. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1981.
  • Fenves, Peter. “Kierkegaard and the Definition of the Demonic.” In Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe. Edited by Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen and Kirk Wetters, 193–200. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014.
  • Franzen, Winfried, Konstantin Georgulis, and Herbert M. Nobis. “Entelechie.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter, Karlfried Gründer and Gottfried Gabriel. 12 vols. Basel: Schwabe, 1971–2004.
  • Friedrich, Lars, Eva Geulen and Kirk Wetters. Das Dämonische: Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2014.
  • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. From My Life: Poetry and Truth, Part Four. Vol. 5 of Goethe’s Collected Works. Edited by Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey Sammons. Translated by Robert R. Heitner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1987.
  • ———. Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens. Edited by Karl Richter, Herbert G. Göpfert, Norbert Miller, and Gerhard Sauder. 21 vols. Munich: Carl Hanser, 1985–1998.
  • ———. Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche. Edited by Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al. 40 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–2013.
  • ———. Werke: Weimarer Ausgabe. Edited by Gustav von Loeper, Erich Schmidt, et. al. 133 vols. Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1887–1919.
  • Gundolf, Friedrich. Goethe. Berlin: Georg Bondi, 1920 [1916].
  • Hamann, Johann Georg. Hamann’s Socratic Memorabilia: A Translation and Commentary. Translated by C. O’Flaherty. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967 [1759].
  • Heraclitus. Fragments. Translated by T. M. Robinson. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1987.
  • Herder, Johann Gottfried. Werke. Edited by Günter Arnold, Martin Bollacher, et. al. 10 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2000.
  • Horace. The Odes and the Centennial Hymn. Translated by James Michie. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs Merrill, 1963.
  • Jaspers, Karl. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Berlin: Julius Springer, 1919.
  • Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. Translated and edited by Alastair Hannay. New York: Norton, 2014.
  • ———. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna N. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1989.
  • Kittel, Gerhard, and Gerhard Friedrich. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament. Translated and edited by Geoffrey W. Bromiley. Grand Rapids, MI: W. M. B. Eerdmans, 1964.
  • Loeb, Ernst. Die Symbolik des Wasserzyklus bei Goethe. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1967.
  • Lukács, Georg. Die Seele und die Formen. Berlin: Egon Fleischl, 1911.
  • ———. Soul and Form. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1974.
  • ———. Die Theorie des Romans. Edited by Frank Benseler and Rüdiger Dannemann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2009 [1920].
  • ———. The Theory of the Novel. Translated by Anna Bostock. London: Merlin Press, 1971.
  • Mann, Thomas. “Deutschland und die Deutschen.” In Essays. Vol. 5, 1938–1945. Edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski, 260-281. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996.
  • Nicholls, Angus. “Daemonic.” In The Oxford Enyclopedia of Literary Theory. Edited by John Frow, Mark Byron, Pelagia Goulimari, Sean Pryoyr, and Julie Rak. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2022.
  • ———. Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006.
  • ———. “The Goethe Complex: Hans Blumenberg on Das Dämonische.” In Das Dämonische. Schicksale einer Kategorie der Zweideutigkeit nach Goethe. Edited by Lars Friedrich, Eva Geulen and Kirk Wetters, 97–119. Munich: Fink, 2014.
  • ———. Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth London and New York: Routledge, 2015.
  • Nisbet, H. B. “Das Dämonische: On the Logic of Goethe’s Demonology.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 7 (1971): 259–81.
  • Otto, Rudolf. Das Heilige: Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen. 4th ed. Breslau: Trewendt und Garnier, 1920 [1917].
  • Plutarch, “On Socrates’s Personal Deity.” In Essays. Translated by Robin Waterfield, 294–358. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992.
  • Posidonius. Posidonius. Vol. 2, The Commentary, Fragments 150-293. Translated and edited by L. Edelstein and I. G. Kidd. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
  • Schmidt, Jochen. Die Geschichte des Genie-Gedankens in der deutschen Literatur, Philosophie und Politik, 1750-1945. 2 vols. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985.
  • Schmitt, Carl. Politische Theologie II. Die Legende von der Erledigung jeder politischen Theologie. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1970.
  • ———. Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political Theology. Translated by Michael Hoelzl and Graham Ward. Cambridge: Polity, 2008.
  • Spranger, Eduard. Goethe: Seine geistige Welt. Tübingen: Hermann Leins, 1967.
  • Tillich, Paul. Das Dämonische. Ein Beitrag zur Sinndeutung der Geschichte. Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1926.
  • ———. “Der Begriff des Dämonischen und seine Bedeutung für die systematische Theologie.” In Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 8, Offenbarung und Glaube. Schriften zur Theologie II. Edited by Renate Albrecht, 285–91. Stuttgart: Evangelisches Verlagswerk, 1970.
  • Wetters, Kirk. Demonic History from Goethe to the Present. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2014.
  • Wiese, Benno von. Das Dämonische in Goethes Weltbild und Dichtung. Münster: Aschendorffsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1949.
  • ———. “Goethes Glaube an das Dämonische.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 32 (1958): 321–44.
  • Zweig, Stefan. Der Kampf mit dem Dämon. Leipzig: Insel, 1928.
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