A Whiteheadian Take on Subjectivity and Philosophical Conceptualization in Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Ganymed’

ABSTRACT

Guided by the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and the transcendental materialism of Gilles Deleuze, this reading of Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Ganymed’ constructs the hymns’ defining polarity with reference to the ‘subjective aims’ of their ‘conceptual personae’. While each mythological figure is driven by a primordial ‘feeling’ along its separate path of ‘satisfaction’, the sum of their grasping moves, or physical and mental ‘prehensions’, constitutes a field of conceptualization that is post-theological and protophilosophical. The problematic Promethean ‘I’, according to this interpretive framing, undergoes a transformative reconfiguration in ‘Ganymed’ through the strategic deployment of the lexemes fassen and fangen, so that its counterpart in subject formation ultimately becomes a Whiteheadian ‘superject’.

KEYWORDS:

• Alfred North Whitehead
• Gilles Deleuze
• philosophical concept
• the virtual
• subjectivity

Notes

1 See the editors’ ‘Introduction’ and Clark S. Muenzer, ‘Begriff (Concept)’, in GLPC < https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/40> and <https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/34> [accessed 17 November 2021].

2 Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: The Free Press, 1967). Well ahead of Whitehead, Goethe described ‘das Abenteuer der Vernunft’ (FA, xxiv, 448) with reference to the ‘reflektierende Urteilskraft’ (ibid.) in Kant’s third critique and its power of intuition, which facilitates an enhanced understanding to think beyond the limits of ‘der Bilder bedürftigen Vestandes’ (ibid.) in the first critique.

3 ‘adventure (n.)’, in Online Etymology Dictionary <https://www.etymonline.com/word/adventure> [accessed 17 November 2021].

4 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen, ed. by Max Hecker (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1907), (p. 207).

5 As a kind of philosophical trope, the Goethean Begriff similarly veers away from settled meanings, thereby promoting what Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari identify as the aim of philosophy: ‘to create concepts that are always new’; see their What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 5.

6 The texts of the first and second versions vary slightly. The versions cited here are from the 1778 manuscript, known as ‘Die erste Weimarer Gedichtsammlung’. The first version of ‘Ganymed’ shows small, but significant, differences that I discuss later in this essay. It can be found in MA, iii/2, 33.

7 See the ‘Vorwort’, where Goethe also challenges the scientific observer and theoretician to connect and theorize the experience of colour production ‘mit Ironie’ (FA, xxiii/1, 14).

8 Concepts that are ubiquitous in Whitehead or Deleuze are enclosed in quotation marks. Most of the major works by each author index their terms. For a glossary of technical terms in Whitehead’s Process and Reality, see John B. Cobb, Jr, A Whitehead Word Book (Anoka: Process Century Press, 2015). For a compilation of Deleuze’s technical vocabulary see The Deleuze Dictionary, ed. by Adrian Parr (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005).

9 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pp. 15–34, esp. p. 22. See also Goethe’s account in ‘Glückliches Ereignis’ (FA, xxiv, 434–38) of his eventful conversation with Schiller about the ideality or reality of his sketch of a ‘symbolische Pflanze’ (p. 437).

10 The phrase is borrowed from Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

11 Quoted in E. M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby, Goethe: Poet and Thinker (London: Arnold, 1962), p. 135.

12 Elisabeth M. Wilkinson, ‘The Theological Basis of Faust’s Credo’, GLL, 10.3 (1957), 229–39.

13 Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (New York: The Free Press, 1978), p. 163, and Steven Shaviro, Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT, 2009), pp. 47–70.

14 See Charlotte Lee, ‘Rhythmus (Rhythm)’, in GLPC, < https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/42> [accessed 17 November 2021].

15 See Faust’s ‘Gefühl ist alles’ (3457) in the Credo-scene.

16 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 63.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid., p. 38. See the Erdgeist-scene in Faust (501–09).

19 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 204.

20 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1966).

21 Christian P. Weber, Die Logik der Lyrik: Goethes Phänemonologie des Geistes in Gedichten (Freiburg i. Br.: Rombach, 2013), pp. 280–81.

22 David E. Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 287–344. See also Cobb: ‘Prehensions are the way that what is there becomes something here’ (p. 29).

23 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World: Lowell Lectures 1925 (New York: The Free Press, 1967), p. 69.

24 Benedict de Spinoza, The ‘Ethics’ and Other Works, ed. and transl. by Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 154.

25 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 7.

26 Shaviro, Without Criteria, p. 22; Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 31.

27 Spinoza, p. 154.

28 Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 232–33.

29 Without Criteria, p. 13.

30 Ibid.

31 See John H. Smith, ‘Ach (Ah, Alas)’, in GLPC <https://goethe-lexicon.pitt.edu/GL/article/view/28> [accessed 18 November 2021].

32 Process and Reality, p. 155

33 Ibid.

34 A Whitehead Word Book, p. 33.

35 Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 150.

36 Ibid.

37 Don Garrett, Nature and Necessity in Spinoza’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 26.

38 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 22.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clark S. Muenzer

Clark Muenzer is co-editor of the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts and an Emeritus Professor in German at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also served as executive secretary and president of the Goethe Society of North America. German literature and culture of the long eighteenth century has been the focus of his research for years, with special emphasis on the relationship of literature to philosophy. In his recent articles and work on the GLPC, Muenzer has reflected on Goethe’s heterodox engagement with western metaphysics in dialogue with such twentieth-century philosophical heretics as Alfred North Whitehead and Gilles Deleuze.