Nietzsche and Goethe: The Tension of Belief and Rationalism

The conclusion of our two-parter on Erich Heller, and the conclusion to season five! We discuss Nietzsche's friendship with Jacob Burckhardt, and how Burckhardt's view of history can inform our understanding of Nietzsche's divergence from him. We also consider Goethe's four ages of intellectual culture, and Nietzsche's echo of Goethe in his history of European nihilism, and how he comes to differ from Goethe, Schopenhauer and all his influences in his proclamations about history, in which the Overman shall transcend the cyclical, unchanging stagnation of human history by changing the nature of man himself. Finally, we consider what the hazard of modern poetry means for us in the present day, what each figure's answer to this divorce between symbol & real means, whether they succeeded or not, and what we can learn from them.