1

Reading Experience in Faust

Dear Clayton,
I would like to speak to you about a matter that I hope will interest you very
much. Many of your friendsall devotees of your workhave joined hands in this book
to celebrate your experience with literature. The matter I have in mind is this very
concept of experience, which we students of German literature would expect to find
most richly elaborated in Goethe, the very avatar of experience and the idea of
experience--and foremost in his vice-exister, Faust. I would like to think with you
about reading this thing experience in Faust. As we proceed, you will see why I am
unable to write, more familiarly, that we will be reading the word experience in Faust.
Commenons!
Here is the first of three mottoes, in three genres, that preface my remarks. It
comes from the Notebooks of Ludwig Wittgenstein:
Earth-thoughts retreat in the face of world-thoughts. . . . Everything
Faustian is alien to me [hence, earth thoughts are alien to me]; a
thousand questions grow mute in [the face of] redemption. I do not
know any doctrines or any heresies.1
Hence, for Wittgenstein, Fausts gathering of experience under the aegis of the Earth
Spirit amounts neither to redemption nor to a doctrine of whatever sort; and here
Wittgensteins literary judgment seems to be one with Fausts own.

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My second motto, Taoist in spirit, comes from a self-help tract by the lesbian
feminist Rita Mae Brown:
Good judgment comes from experience; and often experience
comes from bad judgment.2
The latter clause Often experience comes from bad judgmentreads like an apt
demotic restatement of the Lords dictum: Man errs as long as he strivesthat is,
woman goes willy nilly on a journey of experience (erring all the way) as long as she puts
striving ahead of good judgment. And in response to the first sentencethe claim that
good judgment comes from experiencewere prompted, by the spirit that always
denies, to conclude that in Fausts case, its bad judgment that comes from experience.
The third motto comes from an essay by Jim Heath, written after the windmill
hed constructed on the Isle of Man was battered by gale-force winds.
To borrow words from the great Goethe: real experience is the sort
of experience you don't want to have.3
This idea might be true on its own termsyou will have noted (if youll allow me this
surmise) some tension between what we want and what reality has forced us to want;
and this might even be true as something the great Goethe said. In any case the
implication is suggestive: Fausts craving for real experience is not driven by the desire
for joy; it is not happiness thats at stake but intensity and danger; and so, at its tensest,
experience becomes the supreme test and swiftly approaches death.
As I tell you these things, I might also intuit some resistance on your part to any
such enterprise as a scholastic reading of the concept of experience in Faust (even with

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Wittgenstein and Benjamin as helpers). I mean, it is a topic that one might have
thought already fully exhausted, say, in the article by Otto Heller, Goethe and
Wordsworth, on pages 131-133 of MLN (no. 14), 1899. Is there really something new to
say about Faust and his experience? Why, today the words are already on top of us even
before we begin to read the poem. So in the preface to Martin Greenbergs 1992translation, we read:
For Faust, who has left that [old religious] world behind, there are
no inescapable consequences [as there are for Gretchen . . .]. Faust
says so almost in his first words: Mich plagen keine Skrupel noch
Zweifel, /Frchte mich weder vor Hlle noch Teufel (Im not
bothered by a doubt or a scruple, /Im not afraid of Hell or the
Devil). But [continues Greenberg], Faust has nothing with which to
replace the old belief-world [and so he asks:] Wer lehret mich?
Was soll ich meiden? (Wholl teach me [what to seek], what to
shun?)other than [Greenberg concludes] experience, and ever
new experience, . . . [Fausts] striving and searching that always
ends in shipwreck (emphasis added, SC). 4
Experience figures as the outcome of striving and searching for something as
valuable and comforting as the lost belief-world. But does it amount, in Faust, to this-or even to that sedate judgment that will teach him what to seek and what to shun?
Karl Eibl, who wrote a monograph titled Das monumentale Ich, writes apropos of

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Fausts attempt to qualify for continuing life after death, according to the prescriptions
of the popular philosophy of his time:5
The candidate Faust is damned poorly (herzlich schlecht) prepared
for that thrusting upwards into the Beyond. Es irrt der Mensch,
solang er strebt: this grandseigneur-ish sentence of The Lord
does its work throughout the whole length of the poem. Faustand
the formula can be reconstructed thushas an immense number of
experiences but learns nothing as a result of them (emphasis
added, SC). 6
No expectation from the start that his experience will issue into good judgment.
Martin Greenberg, whom I mentioned above, acknowledges instruction from our
excellent colleague Cyrus Hamlin, and we find the following suggestive remark in
Hamlins essay Reading Faust.7 Hamlin refers to the striving and searching of
scholars to show the ultimate structural coherence of Faust (which, following Hamlin,
cannot be defined in strictly dramatic terms, nor even by reference to the concerns of
Faust the character, since in the later parts of the work Faust isnt even present!). Still,
continues, Hamlin,
Some principle of thematic interaction must be applied to the work
as a whole, whereby the various figures, motifs, forms, and styles
may be seen to interact within a myriad of interlinking patterns to
constitute a vast fabric, which ultimately comprehends much of
what Goethe had to say about human life, about the world, about

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time, and history, about the ultimate values and the ultimate
powers which govern everything in our experience. 8
There is some higher mimicry at work here; Hamlin may be responding to the
language of Fausts encounter with the symbol of the macrocosm: Wie alles sich zum
Ganzen webt (How everything weaves itself into a whole). But the all-comprehensive
pattern that Hamlin strives to see by dint of an application of principle is likely to
disappoint him just as much as it did Faustit is only a glamorous icon, ein Schauspiel
nur!--the commentators spectacle. But how impressive the conclusion to Hamlins
project: we have it at the end, that plangent word, anchoring the search for the whole:
whatever vision of the whole might be offered, it must be tested for its basic adequacy to
our experience.
And last, among the best of others writing on Faust, Lawrence Lipking, in The
Life of the Poet, saw this range of experience not as ours but as Goethes: Periodically,
about once a decade, he [Goethe] would return to the manuscript and incorporate in it
everything he had learned. Faust contained the essence of his experience and his
wisdom.9 His experience. For Hamlin the stake in the range and value of experience
was higher: Where the work Faust is, says Hamlin, there is, in essence, all possible
experienceours! But since, with the exception of the passages when Faust is not
present, the great vehicle of our experience is Faust, then Fausts experience, not
Goethes, is ours, and ours is his. Valry: Mon Faust. Monsieur [le Docteur] Faust
cest moi. The distinction between these two orders of experience is best drawn by
Nietzsche, in his On the Genealogy of Morals:

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We should be on our guard against that confusion . . . in which even an
artist can too easily get caught up, as if he himself were what he can
present, imagine, and express. In fact, the case is this: if that's what he
was, he simply would not present, imagine, or express it. Homer would not
have written a poem about Achilles or Goethe a poem about Faust if
Homer had been Achilles or Goethe had been Faust. 10
Note, too, in Lipkings account, the easy association of the terms experience and
wisdom; this association is exactly what the work Faust finds moot. We deal in Faust
crucially with a speculative dissociation of the categories of experience and judgment or
wisdom or some sort of cognitive profit--what Milton calls, apropos of Samson
Agonistes (freed from the Mill with Slaves), a new acquist of true experience.
So, to sum up: Greenberg and Hamlin, star American contributors, speak of the
soul of the Faust drama as the adventure of experience. For Wittgenstein such
experience is opposed to redemption; for Lipking, on the other hand, it leads to wisdom,
the rationalists redemption. But the thing itself--experience? It is like salt in seawater,
and so it has gone invisible. What is it, and what does it mean? We might well ask.
At this juncture I will salute the contribution of Elizabeth Powers, an
independent scholar, who has addressed head-on this very topic of experience in several
other works of Goethe. Her chief argument reads as follows, as I stay close to the letter
of her thought. The period in which Goethe began to write (let us say from the 1770s on)
was one in which normative poetics was crumbling. Traditional genres like tragedy
and epic as well as minor forms like pastoral, to which Goethe was partial, became

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increasingly hard to sustain, owing to the difficulty of maintaining the decorum, that is,
the behavior (of persons) called for by these genres. The basic cause of this upheaval is
that decorous generic behavior was rooted in a social hierarchy based on privilege.
These rules for living arose within a pre-capitalist social order. The new mercantile
order, however, literally freed people, bit by bit--men at first, but later women--from old
social bonds, which are increasingly portrayed as superannuated.
Now Faust is rooted in Sturm und Drang emotions, the emotions of a generation
that rebelled against social as well as literary conventions. Works about young men who
feel they have no place in the old social order--Werther, Wilhelm Meister (and in
France, St. Preux in Rousseaus Julie [1761] through Adolphe [1816] to Julien Sorel
[1830] and Fabrizio del Dongo [1839]) see a problem in this new freedom and initiate
new literary forms to represent itmixed genres and, especially, the novel. The upshot
of this new mobility, writes Powers, is the centering force of a desire for experience:
jettisoned from the old social order, you are on your own and have to find your own way.
Hence the Bildungsroman (the novel of acculturation) becomes a major occupation.
Significantly, Hegel's discussion of both experience and Bildung11 indicates the
prominence of this new problematic. In this situation, there arises the question of the
identity of literary characters, which is after all a function of generic convention.
Goethes mixing of genres, par excellence in Faust, leads to the difficulty of specifying
the identity of such characters, especially Faust himself. 12 In a word, the status of
selfhood is imperiled; and, indeed, following the itinerary of Powers thought, we land
here in an instructive tautology, since the Latin adjective empiricus--from the Gr.

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empeirik-os, derived from em-peiria, meaning experience-- itself arises from the
prefix en (in) plus the root peira (trial, experiment, dare). The very word for experience
is to be in the midst of a dare, to wager the self.
A final allusion to Elizabeth Powers work: in a related essay she argues, apropos
of Werther and the Sesenheim episode of Dichtung und Wahrheit, that Goethe's
crossbreeding of literary forms thrusts literary inhabitants into worlds they find
uncanny: they cannot be at home in them. (That gives us an excellent re-entry into
Faust, who is principally der Unbehauste, the man without home). These imperiled
figures become all too aware of the constraints on their existence: for Werther, they are
excessive; for Faust, they are too few. It is only on leaving the traditional social order
behind, Powers argues, that they begin to have experiences; and she concludes with the
elegant but discussable idea that Experience is what one has when one is no longer
imitating a model.13
As we hold these social-psychological perspectives in mind, Ill want to turn more
directly to the text of Faust I and Faust II in search of the indisputable grounding
context; we need finally to look for Goethes own use of the wordbe it Erfahrung or
Erlebnis or one of its cognates, the verb erfahren or erleben--only to be met by a great
surprise, for none of these terms makes more than a scant appearance in Faust, let
alone a strong appearance. The verb erleben appears twice in Faust I, altogether
casually, and once in Faust II; and aside from a single appearance of the nominal form
Erfahrung in Faust I, there is no further instance of even a single form of the verb
erfahren in Faust I. Forms of this verb do appear a couple of times, though again

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rather casually, in Faust II, but the word does not designate the great adventurous
thrust of Fausts new being.
With what result? Short of giving up the very concept of experience in Faust,
which seems impermissible, we must rethink it from two sources: by reflecting on the
hermeneutic Vor-griff (fore-concept) concerning experience that we bring to this search
for the meaning of experience in Faust; and by coming to it through cognate words and
thoughts and images in the text of Faust, like knowledge (Wissen) and knowledge
(Erkenntnis) -- or something even more radical.
As good practitioners of the hermeneutic circle, however, we know that no Vorgriff has a purely conceptual origin; it arises in conjunction with a reading of Faust that
has already taken place; and I will now, in a practical sense, disrupt this origin by
introducing (a piece of) Faust that can stand in for the whole. I think of it as the
strongest imaginable cut into Faust. It is the citation of a nuclear passage from the first
Study-scene with Mephisto. Beginning line 1760, Mephisto says:
Euch ist kein Ma und Ziel gesetzt.
Beliebts Euch, berall zu naschen,
Im Fliehen etwas zu erhaschen,
Bekomm Euch wohl, was Euch ergetzt.
Nur greift mir zu und seid nicht blde!
To which Faust replies, magisterially:
Du hrest ja, von Freud ist nicht die Rede.
Dem Taumel weih ich mich, dem schmerzlichsten Genu,
Verliebtem Ha, erquickendem Verdru.
Mein Busen, der vom Wissensdrang geheilt ist,
Soll keinen Schmerzen knftig sich verschlieen,
Und was der ganzen Menschheit zugeteilt ist,
Will ich in meinem innern Selbst genieen,

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Mit meinem Geist das Hchst und Tiefste greifen,
Ihr Wohl und Weh auf meinen Busen hufen,
Und so mein eigen Selbst zu ihrem Selbst erweitern,
Und, wie sie selbst, am End auch ich zerscheitern.
(basically in Walter Kaufmanns translation):
You are not bound by goal or measure
If you would nibble everything
Or snatch up something on the wing
Youre welcome to what gives you pleasure
But help yourself and dont be shy!
To which Faust replies, magisterially,
Do you not hear, I have no thought of joy!
The reeling whirl I seek, the most painful excess,
Enamored hate and quickening distress.
Cured from the craving to know all, my mind
Shall not henceforth be closed to any pain,
And what is portioned out to all mankind,
I shall enjoy deep in my self, contain
Within my spirit summit and abyss,
Pile on my breast their agony and bliss,
And thus let my own self grow into theirs, unfettered,
Till as they are, at last I, too, am shattered.
(Temporality of the shock!)
Ive had this passage in mind, for a long time, as a tutelary figure, while
attempting the conceptual work it requires to be understood.
2.
In this matter of the Vor-griff, Clayton, you may recall that in Cyrus Hamlin's
portmanteau sentence, experience came at the end, like death, as death comes at the
end of the picture of experience weve just read. Its this terminus ad quem that leads
me to declare the special interest that I have had right along in this topicits one that I
consider crucial for the concept of experience in Faust.

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Now unlike you, ClaytonI am older than you--I am close to that stage of life
when, like Everyman, Im obliged to contemplate the hangmans noose. And so I am
naturally interested in conversations about the end. And what can be said indubitably
about death (I mean going through dying)as one is sooner or later toldis that, as
the Germans say, it is einmalig--at once unique, as dictionaries tell us, and also, as
colloquial speech tells us, fantastic! amazing!, of crucial importance, and, more
literally, an event that happens just once (for me and you). Yes, dying to death is
einmalig, and in these accounts one of the German words for experience invariably
follows: Death is ein einmaliges Erlebnis, a unique experience--though nevernote,
prolepticallyeine einmalige Erfahrung. Its this distinction, forecast by Walter
Benjamin, which Ill now turn onto Faust.
Boldly, obstinately, proleptically ignoring the claims of modern media theory
(and hence one of Benjamins own great insistences!) and assuming that there has been
no basic change in the concept of experience since Goethe finished writing Faust in
1832--for just consider the insouciant, anachronistic use of the term by Greenberg and
Hamlin and Lipking, among many other authorities--I conclude that whatever is to be
understood by Goethes concept of experience in Faust is the sort of thing that dying to
death indubitably is; so that any other psychological or objectively ascertainable event
befalling a consciousness might be called experience only insofar as it shares the key
features of dying to death: and that would have to be chiefly this factor of oneself being
engaged by the thingits mine-ness--and with all ones resources, all ones life gathered
to a point (hence the term Erlebnis), so that one is entirely imperiled by it, as opposed

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to enjoying the safety of having seen such a thing or heard tell about the thing (wissen
davon) or having a choice with respect to how much of ones life one wished to give over
to it. In a way, it is only in dying, as Heidegger writes, that I can say absolutely I
am.14
This model, I say, might seem plausible enough as an account of experience in
Faust, especially as we build on to it, thinking, again, of its Einmaligkeit, its uniqueness
in time--a certain standing-apart character of this experience vis--vis other facts I
might possess about it as knowledge of it. It must stand apart from other of my
experiences . . . but now a moments reflection draws us up short. If experience is
individual, incomparably individual, as ones own dying to death must be, einmalig,
then it cannot be understood, either by me or another, because it cannot be
distinguished, identified, and compared (and, indeed, think of Fausts preferred
turmoil): it cannot be shared, it has nothing but the will o the wisp of a private language
to be told in; and there is no time, after death, to tell it in. It is einmal-ig; but, then
again, insofar as dying ones own death belongs inescapably to the trajectory of a human
life-- this thing, ein Menschenleben, that we all have, this thing that is all we have--it
would appear to have the sort of general, shareable dimension we associate with
Erfahrung.
Now in one sense the problem of the form of experience in Faust solves itselfat
the level of the poetic account and hence the generally intelligible account of experience.
Art is this experience. The very fact that we are dealing in the artwork Faust with a
readable representation of what befalls Faust entitles us to call this work Fausts

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Erfahrungexperience as discriminated life organized, beneath the threshold of
conceptual understanding (a mere wissen von), from past to future. (Recall, here,
Goethes famous reflection on the nature of poetry: it expresses something particular
without thinking of the universal or pointing to it. Whoever grasps this particular in a
living way will simultaneously receive the universal, too, without even becoming aware
of it--or realize it only later).15 Only later. This strengthens the cogency of the term
Erfahrung for poetic representation.
And, for the record, here is an attractive modern statement of the idea that art is
the experience (Erfahrung) of whatever it concerns--a statement that will push our
thought along. In a letter to Clara dated June 24, 1907, Rilke writes, All art, surely, is
the result of ones having been in danger, of having gone through an experience
(Erfahrung) all the way to the end, where no one can go any further. 16
But that is not, finally, the level at which I want us to define our topic. We are
concerned not with how the fact of Fausts experience is represented by the poet for us,
but--to the extent that it is possible to make this distinction--how Faust represents the
fact of experience to himselfequally, not the fact that Fausts experience is represented
in an intelligible way but the sort of intelligibility it has for him, where it is by no means
a foregone conclusion that it is any sense transparent, for him, to the Hegelian Idea
(cf. Hegel on Faust in the Phenomenology) or to Goethes the universal.
So here, to enlarge the terms of our conversation, in re the uniqueness and
generality of experience, let me conjure up two texts: one written in 1795, as very

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possibly a plain response to Goethes Faust, and one written in 1995, as very definitely a
plain response to Goethes Faust.
The first text is part of the famous Fragment of Hlderlins novel Hyperion,
which Ill read as a comment on Goethes FaustEin Fragment, first published in
Goethes Collected Works of 1790. This passage addresses the problem of experience (as
we encounter it in Faust) as a tension between, one, the personality, privacy, and
privativeness of experience versus, two, its generally human or impersonal character.
Hlderlin writes:
There are two ideals of existence: a state of the highest simplicity,
where our needs are reciprocally attuned to themselves, and to our
powers, and to everything with which we are connected, through
the mere organization of nature, without our cooperation [SC: we
are without experience; think of Gretchen]; and a state of the
highest cultivation (Bildung), where the same would take place
amid infinitely multiplied and intensified needs and powers,
through the organization that we are able to give ourselves
[SC: the organization that we are able to give ourselves; that is a
good enough account of the path of experience. But there is more,
and it is the crux:] The eccentric path [continues Hlderlin] along
which man, in general and in particular, takes his way from one
point (of more or less pure simplicity) to the other (of more or less

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fulfilled cultivation [Bildung]) appears, in its essential directions, to
be always the same.17
This is the core of late-eighteenth century German poetic and philosophical
meditation par excellence: it concerns the contingency vs. the essentialness of
experiencewithout which essentialness, in the absence of (what Greenberg calls) the
belief-world, it may, in the face of death, be difficult to redeem (recall Wittgenstein).
Only if the eccentric path of human experience were indeed, in its essential directions,
always the same, could it be supposed that ones dying to death, too, were essentially the
same for the great community of human beings and is indeed in itself something
essential. And, in this sense (and here I come to the core of what I want to say to you), it
is more than an Erlebnis, it is Erfahrung, for it is Erfahrung that acquires the predicate
of essential and general impersonality.
But what is entailed by this claim? Such generality points in principle to its
repeatability both within the career of the personal life and within the community.
Erfahrung arises out of, and points back to, it its own past, whose elements it
reassembles or reproduces; and it is bent on its own reproduction and hence on
magnetizing a field of . . . future experience according to its salient features. This
conforms to Goethes view of the matter in all his later writings. One well-known aperu
from Maxims and Reflections reads (if somewhat oddly, in English), Experience is only
half of experience. The remark makes good sense in context. Goethe writes, first:

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When artists speak of nature, they always surreptitiously insert
[subintelligieren] the Idea, without being clearly conscious of doing
so.
(The idea, in the natural event, is this factor of generality and essentialness). Goethe
continues:
This is precisely the way it is with all those who praise experience
exclusively; they do not consider that the experience is only half of
the experience.18
This sequence of ideas is illuminated by a passage from the earlier The
Experiment as Mediator: Each and every experience that we have, each and every
experiment by means of which we repeat it, is truly an isolated part of our knowledge;
through frequent repetition we achieve certainty as to this isolated piece of
knowledge.19
Now this is the issue that concerns us: in light of the death-driven, deathimmersed character of Fausts experience, how are we to understand the general
concept of experience in Faust, starting with the problem of how we are to translate or
paraphrase it. This is a problem that certainly cannot have gone unnoticed in more
recent commentaries, and so here is the text I promised you from 1995, from Nicholas
Boyles celebrated critical biography, Goethe: The Poet and the Age. In Vol. I, The
Poetry of Desire, Boyle writes, apropos of the Urfaust, of
the equilibrium of all [Goethes] * * * mature work, a poetry as near
as may be of individual, autobiographical, objective feeling. Clearly

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we are not here dealing [, Boyle continues,] with what F.R. Leavis
called the profound impersonality in which experience matters,
not because it is mine . . . but because it is what it is [SC: hence,
accessible to any consciousness], the mine mattering only in so far
as the individual sentience is the indispensable focus of
experience. Equally, however, [Boyle continues], Goethes work
now and later does not at its best offer us the unappealing
alternative that Leavis constructs, in which experience matters . . .
because it is to me that it belongs, or happens, or because it
subserves or issues in purpose or will. Rather [, Boyle concludes,]
we are dealing with what we might call a personal impersonality
myself not myselfin which the quality experience has of being
mine has itself become an experience * * * [SC: How is this
second-order experience mediated?]. Such an impersonally
personal poetry has its limitations, beyond a doubt. There is
perhaps a profundity, and there are certainly experiences it cannot
encompass. The Urfaust contains a broad spectrum of ways in
which experience can be mine, from abstract contemplation,
through shared misunderstanding to moral responsibility, but it
stops short at renunciation, at the submission to the threat of
death . . . 20

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This is very interesting, and yet I should think that submission to the threat of
death is exactly whats at the core of the mine-ness of experience (recall: mein eigen
Selbst . . . . auch ich zerscheitern [my own self . . . I, too, am shattered]). We see Boyle,
to my gratitude, haunted by this issue, but solving itwith a notion of equilibrium
precisely by not bringing death into it. Because a death-driven, death-immersed
experience poses a continual difficulty.
For recall, how, having designated the futural thrust of all experience as
Erfahrung, and thinking of this futural dimension of experience as constitutive of it, we
have a worry on our hands: under these circumstances, death cannot be an experience
of this sort --not even dying into death. Is death properly cast back as an Erlebnis then?
How must we think about it, supposing that if we cannot conceive of dying to death as
an appropriate kind of experience, then we cannot conceive of experience at all.
Lets move to a conclusion. To do so well enlist a last authority, whom Ive
mentioned in passing above. Weve reserved the word Erlebnis for the unrepeatable
dimension of the thing under inquiry and the word Erfahrung for experience as
properly repeatable. So here is a famous reflection by Benjamin (this eminent Goethe
critic!) to refine the distinction between these terms in an essay on Baudelaire apropos
the shock factor of modern life, viz.:
The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions,
the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen
against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these
impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the

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sphere of a certain hour in one's life (Erlebnis). Perhaps the special
achievement of shock defense may be seen in its function of
assigning to an incident a precise point in time in consciousness at
the cost of the integrity of its contents.

This is to say, such befallings tend to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in ones life.
Here Benjamin adjusts our formulation of Erlebnis: from ones life gathered to a point
to ones life up to a point! The passage continues:
This would be a peak achievement too of the intellect; it would turn
the incident into a moment that had been lived (Erlebnis). Without
reflection there would be nothing but the sudden start, usually the
sensation of fright which, according to Freud, confirms the failure
of the shock defense. 21
So hyperconsciousness goes to Erlebnis at the cost of certain contents slipping in
under its shield and at a depth. On these terms we can grasp Fausts entire project as
meant to dissolve his shock defense: we return to the lines: Im not bothered by a
doubt or a scruple, /Im not afraid of Hell or the Devil. On these terms he is bent on
Erfahrung over Erlebnis and hence he is open to death (which would make sense only if
he intended to survive it!).
If we are now to incorporate Benjamins distinctions into my previous remarks,
we will associate the term Erlebnis with hyperconsciousness and the possibility of
working the thing up through reflection. But right along we have been associating a

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certain intelligibility, a generally perceptible, shareable, and repeatable structure with
Erfahrung, not Erlebnis. Benjamin gives us a memorable example of the structure of
Erfahrung, empirically speaking, in what one takes in from the story told by a
storyteller who has come from afar, in light of the German saying, When someone goes
on a trip, he has something to tell about (this something to tell about is what he or she
has er-fahren, it is his or her Er-fahrung). 22 Benjamin explains: The storyteller takes
what he tells from experiencehis own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes
it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. 23 This truth reaches a maximum
when the story is told by Hlderlin and Hegelthe story of the generally communicable
structure of experience in its most exalted moment, at which point the dying self grasps
the Concept of the Absolute Spirit that is the true desideratum of all finite and particular
experience.
So, returning to Benjamin, while holding on to the distinction between Erlebnis
and Erfahrung, with a view to formulating the right concept of experience in Faust, Ill
now need to distinguish between two kinds of intelligibility: on the one hand, there is
the felt autobiographical character of the Erlebnis, owing to its confinement to a
moment in ones personal itineraryits unique mine-ness, above all; and on the other
hand, there is the general, repeatable, impersonal intelligibility of experience, which
emerges through the telling of a story in which one sharesperhaps most pointedly
through ones participation in a ritual telling, as in the celebration of a religious holiday,
where the Bible is read or the Haggadah is read or the Phenomenology is read or Faust
is read; such experience is at its core communicable, readable. And so it is here that we

22
can begin to glimpse the way in which experience (in Faust) might finally be structured,
as the most intense Erlebnis that shall somehow be impersonal, hence, have the
character of Erfahrung, or to get right down to it, as the experience of the limit-case of
the greatest tension of opposites and hence something like dying-into-death, with this
proviso: that it be at the same time a kind of death that must not be final and from
which one survives to tell, as we say, the tale. That is the meaning of the involvement
both structurally and teleologically of death in Fausts experience; death for him calls for
the most intense investment of life (as resistance), for my life is at stake, and in this one
sense is the exemplar of Erlebnis; and in another sense the truest Erfahrung (as
acquiescence), for it arrives on the condition that these very shock defenses we put up as
the precondition of the Erlebnis, fail. Faust strives for a personal itinerary of
experiences (for he has wasted his person hitherto--on the sterile accumulation of fact
called Wissen); and yet each of these experiences must have the general truth of death
and the deep knowledge that the thing gives of itself. And so, as we now begin our
concluding ricorso to the text itself, it is no accident that the three great projects that
Faust pursues and all of which failLove (for Gretchen), Beauty (in Helena), and Power
(as a tyrant)all issue into an experience of death that he somehow survives and about
which, for him, Goethe tells the tale.
Marguerite dies and Faust all but dies of the grief of it; Faust cannot prevent
Helena from being taken back into the kingdom of death; and he dies in the act of
proclaiming himself the master of the salvaged lands of the North. And yet of course, he
does not die; he never really dies, because hes saved. (That made Nietzsche mad!). And

23
yet he just all but dies at the end of Part I, and only the flowers and fairies can blow
away his sickness-unto-death, his melancholic stupor, after the death of Gretchen; and
he suffers the death of his beloved love-child Euphorion; and he falls down dead at the
end of Part II100 years oldand only the quite serious jest of a LeibnizeanMariolatrous heaven can breathe new life into him.
Dear Clayton, I hope this essay that I have composed in your honor will breathe
not new but yet more life in you at a moment that falls well, well short of any moment in
which youd absolutely require it!

Notes

Der Erdgedanke tritt vor dem Weltgedanken zurck. . . . . Alles Faustische ist mir fremd,

tausend Fragen sind in Erlsung verstummt. Ich kenne weder Lehren noch Irrlehren.
Wittgenstein, Tagebcher 1898-1918, ed. Wolfgang Kersten (Bern: Hatje, 1988), 400.
http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/rita_mae_brown.htm

Jim Heath, The Windmill Experience. This essay, originally published in the Isle of
Man Times, was reprinted on the Web on January 2, 2004.
http://www.viacorp.com/windmill-experience.html
4

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven:

Yale UP, 1992), xii.

5

For example, in Johann Joachim Spalding, Die Bestimmung des Menschen (1748). Cited
in Karl Eibl, Das monumentale IchWege zu Goethes Faust, insel taschenbuch 2663
(Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 2000), 60ff.
6

Eibl, 331.

This essay precedes Hamlins collection of critical essays in Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter
Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton, 1976).

Ibid., 373-74.

Lawrence Lipking, The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 94.
10

Man soll sich vor der Verwechselung hten, in welche ein nur zu leicht selbst gerth * * *
: wie als ob er [der Knstlerviz. Goethe] selber das wre, was er darstellen, ausdenken,
ausdrcken kann. Thatschlich steht es so, dass, wenn er eben das wre, er es

schlechterdings nicht darstellen, ausdenken, ausdrcken wrde; ein Homer htte keinen
Achill, ein Goethe keinen Faust gedichtet, wenn Homer ein Achill und wenn Goethe ein
Faust gewesen wre. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in Drei Bnden (Mnchen: Hanser,
1955), 2: 843.

11

Phaenomenologie des Geistes, VI. Der Geist. B. Der sich entfremdete Geist; die

Bildung (Teddington, Middlesex, U.K.: Echo Library, 2006), 213.

12

Elizabeth Powers, From Empfindungsleben' to Erfahrungsbereich: The Creation of

Experience in Goethes Die Laune des Verliebten, Goethe Yearbook: Publications of the
Goethe Society of North America (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 1996), 8: 1-27.

13

Elizabeth Powers, The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to

Sesenheim, Goethe Yearbook, 1999; 9: 47-76.

14

Martin Heidegger, Prologomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger

(Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1979), 439.

15

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Berliner Ausgabe. Kunsttheoretische Schriften und

bersetzungen (Berlin: Aufbau 1960), 18:516.

16

Kunstdinge sind ja immer Ergebnisse des in Gefahrgewesen-Seins, des in einer

Erfahrung bis ans Ende-Gegangenseins, bis wo kein Mensch mehr weiterkann. Rainer
Maria Rilke, Briefe ber Cezanne, ed. Clara Rilke (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1952), 9.

17

Es gibt zwei Ideale unseres Daseins: einen Zustand der hchsten Einfalt, wo unsre

Beduerfnisse mit sich selbst, und mit unsern Krften, und mit allem, womit wir in
Verbindung stehen, durch die bloe Organisation der Natur, ohne unser Zutun, gegenseitig

zusammenstimmen [SC: we are without experience; think of Gretchen], und einen

Zustand der hchsten Bildung, wo dasselbe statt finden wuerde bei unendlich
vervielfltigten und verstrkten Beduerfnissen und Krften, durch die Organisation, die
wir uns selbst zu geben im Stande sind [SC: the organization that we are able to give
ourselves; that is a good enough account of the path of experience. But there is more, and
it is the crux:]. Die exzentrische Bahn [continues Hlderlin] die der Mensch, im
Allgemeinen und Einzelnen, von einem Punkte (der mehr oder weniger reinen Einfalt)
zum andern (der mehr oder weniger vollendeten Bildung) durchluft, scheint sich, nach
ihren wesentlichen Richtungen, immer gleich zu sein. Fragment von Hyperion [1793],
Werke und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Beiner and Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1969)
1:439-40.

18

Wenn Knstler von Natur sprechen, subintelligieren sie immer die Idee, ohne sichs

deutlich bewut zu sein. /Ebenso gehts allen, die ausschlielich die Erfahrung anpreisen;
sie bedenken nicht, dass die Erfahrung nur die Hlfte der Erfahrung ist. J. W. Goethe,
Berliner Ausgabe, 18: 633.
19

Eine jede Erfahrung, die wir machen, ein jeder Versuch, durch den wir sie wiederholen,
ist eigentlich ein isolierter Teil unserer Erkenntnis; durch ftere Wiederholung bringen wir
diese isolierte Kenntnis zur Gewiheit. J. W. Goethe, Der Versuch als Vermittler von
Objekt und Subjekt, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gesprche, ed. Ernst Beutler
(Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1949), 16: 849
20

Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, vol. 1, The Poetry of Desire (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 218-219.

21

Walter Benjamin, ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.

Hermann Schweppenhuser and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp

Taschenbuch, 1991), I,2: 615.

22

Benjamin, Der Erzhler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, Gesammelte

Schriften, II,2: 440.

23

Ibid, 443.