11 - Truth. Paradox. Irony

Summary

Truth

WIEDERHOLTE SPIEGELUNGEN! The paradox of the love-death tradition is mirrored in Goethe's conception of truth and in the Romantic irony with which he shows that any representation of reality that is free from irony only masks it further. His passion for the truth, however, is an enduring flame, as is evident in the energy he expended on scientific experimentation and in his polemics against Newton.

Goethe's position on the truth, on the accessibility of ultimate things to human cognition, and on the faculties with which we access and communicate “truth” rewards careful study. Johann Christian Kestner wrote of the twenty-three-year-old Goethe: “Er strebt nach Wahrheit; hält jedoch mehr vom Gefühl derselben, als von ihrer Demonstration” (FA 2,1:262). Serlo, in the Lehrjahre, speaks of “erlogene Wahrheit” as the quality to be striven for in the theater (FA 1,9:677). And the poet in the “Vorspiel auf dem Theater” says: “Ich hatte nichts und doch genug: / Den Drang nach Wahrheit und die Lust am Trug” (192–93). Truth is a prize never finally or inalienably secured. Only as refracted in the mist of a waterfall, the painted panes of Faust's study, or the conventional categories of a culture is truth available to “Erkennende.” “Jede Form,” wrote Goethe at a young age, “auch die gefühlteste, hat etwas Unwahres, allein sie ist ein für allemal das Glas, wodurch wir die heiligen Strahlen der verbreiteten Natur an das Herz der Menschen zum Feuerblick sammeln” (DjG 5:352).