Goethe Yearbook

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.”¹ 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.² 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.”³ It seems likely that Heidegger, like Husserl or Jaspers, not to mention Gadamer, was one of “Goethe’s children”⁴ 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 1923.⁵ 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).”⁶

Heidegger says Goethe appropriated this fable, via a poem by Herder, and reworked it for the second part of Faust.⁷ In the fable and in Goethe too, Heidegger suggests, care is constitutive of human being or “Dasein”—Heidegger’s word for the kind of being for whom its own existence is an issue.⁸ And care is the being of Dasein as such. Care is what makes us human. [End Page 207]

The theme of “Care” or “Sorge” is as widespread in Goethe as it is fundamental in Heidegger. There is an illuminating coincidence in the vocabulary of Goethe and Heidegger on this theme, and a close look at it may occasion some reflection on other terms and concepts in which the two men invest special significance, such as sich ereignen, Augenblick, “ent-fernen” (with or without a hyphen), “ent-sagen” (this too with or without a hyphen), but here we will focus on Dasein, which Heidegger only arrived at after first experimenting with other designations of facticity such as “ein Solches-Jetzt-Hier.”⁹

In the summer semester of 1921, two years before the publication of Burdach’s essay and six years before the publication of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger lectured on “care” in the writings of St. Augustine, which he does not yet denominate as “Sorge” in German but as “Bekümmerung.” It becomes “Sorge” in his winter semester (WS) lectures of 1921–22 and is fundamental in Sein und Zeit, perhaps influenced by Heidegger’s contemplation of Hyginus’s fable and Goethe’s reworking of it. For Heidegger, Sorge is an ontological term, not an ontic one, and pertains to “the deep structures...