Sorge in Heidegger and in Goethe's Faust

Summary

HEIDEGGER WROTE TO JASPERS ON AUGUST 12, 1949: “I admittedly still lack an adequate relationship to Goethe. That's a real shortcoming but only one of many.” Whatever he may have meant by “an adequate relationship,” even as a Gymnasium student Heidegger was very well read in German literature, “a bit too much, to the detriment of other disciplines,” according to one of his teachers. Every bright and studious young German of Heidegger's generation knew Goethe's main works, and many lines from his poetry or from Faust were proverbial, in any case. It is an understatement when Walter Kaufmann says, “Nineteenth-century German philosophy consisted to a considerable extent in a series of efforts to assimilate the phenomenon of Goethe.” It seems likely that Heidegger, like Husserl or Jaspers, not to mention Gadamer, was one of “Goethe's children” and that Goethe's impact on his thought and language would have been deep and lasting.

Anyone reading Heidegger's Sein und Zeit with Goethe in mind would take note of the author's reference to Konrad Burdach's essay “Faust und die Sorge,” the first article in the first issue of the new journal Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgechichte, which appeared in 1923. Heidegger extracts from Burdach's essay a fable from Hyginus (#220) about “cura”—care or Sorge—which reads as follows:

Once when “Care” was crossing a river, she saw some clay; she thoughtfully picked up a piece and began to shape it. While she was thinking about what she had made, Jupiter came by. “Care” asked him to give it spirit, and this he gladly granted. But when she wanted to give it her name, Jupiter objected, and demanded that it be given his name instead. While “Care” and Jupiter were arguing, Earth (Tellus) stood up and wanted her own name to be conferred upon the creature, since she had given it part of her body. They asked Saturn to be the judge, and he made the following decision, which seemed a just one: “Since you, Jupiter, have given its spirit, you shall receive that spirit at its death; and since you, Earth, have given its body, you shall receive its body. But since ‘Care’ first shaped this creature, it shall be hers for as long as it lives. And since you disagree as to its name, let it be called ‘homo,’ for it is made out of humus (earth).”