Giving style to one's character.

In connection with the whole idea of giving style to one's character, Nietzsche is very fond of mentioning the great example of Goethe, the great German poet and dramatist and novelist and thinker and scientist and mystic. Nietzsche admired Goethe very much and he admired him most of all for this particular quality. If we read Goethe's life, if we read his conversations, we see that Goethe all the time was trying to make something of himself. He was trying to work upon himself just like he might work upon a poem or a drama or a novel or a scientific treatise, making himself better and clearer and more perfect and more balanced. This is what Goethe was trying to do through the whole of his long life, more than eighty years, and he succeeded. So that when the great Napoleon saw Goethe for the first time, what did he say quite spontaneously, when he was confronted by Goethe? And Goethe after all, politically, was nobody, he was just an ex-minister of a little tiny state in Germany; and there was Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe. But when Napoleon saw Goethe, well Goethe wasn't impressed by Napoleon particularly, but Napoleon exclaimed of Goethe: "Look, there's a man." A very simple exclamation but full of meaning. So this is what Goethe made of himself from this sort of bundle of passions and ideas. As a young man he was very turbulent and very wild indeed, quite a rake we are told. But from this rather unpromising raw material, he made of himself a man in the fullest and truest sense.

You can read Sangharakshita’s thoughts and reflections on:
Nietzsche, Milton, Handel and artistic inspiration.
Nietzsche, Goethe and the enemy.
Nietzsche, Zen and Sudden Enlightenment.
Kant, the Buddha and the limits of reason.
The limits of space and time.
Baudelaire and awareness of others.
Spiritual friends.
Giving style to one’s character.
Anarchism.
Schopenhauer and the will to live.
Schopenhauer and aesthetic appreciation.
Mozart and pauses.
Mozart and the unpredictable.
Mozart and the concentrated mind.

[En français] [Auf Deutch].

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Dernière mise à jour:
04 avril, 2007.