In addition to everything else, dont forget:

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Reading Experience in FaustDear 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 1992-translation, 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).

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 Fausts attempt to qualify for continuing life after death, according to the prescriptions of the popular philosophy of his time:

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).

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. 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 time, and history, about the ultimate values and the ultimate powers which govern everything in our experience.

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. 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] Faustcest moi. The distinction between these two orders of experience is best drawn by Nietzsche, in his On the Genealogy of Morals:

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.

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 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 Bildung 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. 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. 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.

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 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 Vor-griff 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,

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.

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 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.

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 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). 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. 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 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 fulfilled cultivation [Bildung]) appears, in its essential directions, to be always the same.

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:

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.

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.

Now this is the issue that concerns us: in light of the death-driven, death-immersed 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 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 impersonalitymyself 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 . . .

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 equilibriumprecisely 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 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.

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 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). 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. 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 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 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 Leibnizean-Mariolatrous 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

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, A Tragedy, trans. Martin Greenberg (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), xii.

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.

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.

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.

Phaenomenologie des Geistes, VI. Der Geist. B. Der sich entfremdete Geist; die Bildung (Teddington, Middlesex, U.K.: Echo Library, 2006), 213.

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.

Elizabeth Powers, The Artist's Escape from the Idyll: The Relation of Werther to Sesenheim, Goethe Yearbook, 1999; 9: 47-76.

Martin Heidegger, Prologomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, ed. Petra Jaeger (Frankfurt a. M.: Klostermann, 1979), 439.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Berliner Ausgabe. Kunsttheoretische Schriften und bersetzungen (Berlin: Aufbau 1960), 18:516.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Walter Benjamin, ber einige Motive bei Baudelaire, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hermann Schweppenhuser and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a.M., Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, 1991), I,2: 615.

Benjamin, Der Erzhler. Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Lesskows, Gesammelte Schriften, II,2: 440.

Ibid, 443.