/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.17615992]

>Das Klassische nenne ich das Gesunde und das Romantische das Kranke. Und da sind die Nibelungen klassisch wie der Homer, denn beide sind gesund und tüchtig. Das meiste Neuere ist nicht romantisch, weil es neu, sondern weil es schwach, kränklich und krank ist, und das Alte ist nicht klassisch, weil es alt, sondern weil es stark, frisch, froh und gesund ist.
Why did Goethe and by extension Schiller make this distinction between the Classical and the Romantic, the healthy and the sick, equilibrium and out-of-equilibrium? Why do these two not make an inseparable whole together?

[Anonymous No.17616467]

Bump interesting thread id like to know as well

[Anonymous No.17616513]

>>17615992
>Why did Goethe and by extension Schiller make this distinction
It's kind of tangled up with their whole lives, and Goethe's rejection of the Romantic was something that went on and off, ironic and sincere, at different times in his life.

It's something far more complex than any 4chan post can explain, and I advise you to read their works for yourselves.

[Anonymous No.17616532]

>>17615992
Take a look at the romantics: all hopeless weirdos. I mean it. People who evoke feelings similar to "enlightened esoterics". Goethe and Schiller are powerful individuals, hard-working and clear-sighted – and yet enraptured, easily moved, hopelessly in love. The masculine and feminine (I can't think of any more appropriate words for this right now) balance each other out. And in the case of the romantics? Nothing but femininity, from top to bottom: hysteria, dreaminess, frailty.

[Anonymous No.17616628]

>>17616532
>And in the case of the romantics? Nothing but femininity, from top to bottom: hysteria, dreaminess, frailty.
But doesn't it only appear this way because this is how the romantics were categorized? What makes Goethe not a romantic himself? Do we not all have a shadow?

[Anonymous No.17616671]

>>17615992
Because Romanticism is antithetical to the Classical good, it blinds you from it and if you take it seriously enough takes you down the road of moral perdition. Basically all modern literature is "Romantic" to the extent that it takes as its sustenance, critically or apologetically, the tradition that sprang from the New Testament and the lives of the saints (martyrology). These are the ur-texts of a dying empire, of authentic civilizational collapse, and the mass warping of reality that occurs under such a relatively precipitous/accelerated event. The martyrdom of the saints is the pain and pathos of the Empire itself represented in the most personified but also mystical form. The body of the saints is the body of the agonizing empire as experienced through the lens of a decadent senatorial class's late stage classical, ie. Virgilio-Platonic, subjectivity. The passion plays are the representations of the collapse of the Classical order itself, which sees destruction, decay, pestilence, savage violation, everywhere, and can only look ultimately heavenward, but, more immediately, towards the institution of the Church as the mausoleum of its late stage imperial hubris (the phenomenology that emanated from this torturous delusional retainment of grandeur). From this perturbed well rises the mutant known as the Byzantine Empire, the antithesis of all that was good and noble in Ancient Greece (the Greece of Homer and Sophocles and Plato), an empire that made no scientific or moral progress in all its lengthy atrophied centuries of existence.

[Anonymous No.17616697]

>>17616671
>an empire that made no scientific or moral progress in all its lengthy atrophied centuries of existence.

[Anonymous No.17616766]

>>17616628
No, even then people knew where they stood with the Romantics. One is schooled in the greatness of the ancients ... and suddenly finds oneself face to face with the cramped room of a patriot poet who picks flowers, writes war songs, and gurgles beer. Romantics (not all of them, of course, but most of them) were people who would whip out their guitar at a party and play Ed Sheeran or Nick Drake respectively. Heine then laid Romanticism to rest. Grillparzer, when he visited Heine, wrote in his diary: Oha! so there are German poets with common sense after all.

[Anonymous No.17616779]

>>17615992
I don't speak barbarian sorry

[Anonymous No.17616788]

>>17615992
I actually inherited a whole shelf of Schiller and Goethe from my recently deceased grandmother. Guess I have to learn german.

[Anonymous No.17616805]

>>17616697
>anime
i decline your contribution.

[Anonymous No.17616856]

>>17616766
>One is schooled in the greatness of the ancients ... and suddenly finds oneself face to face with the cramped room of a patriot poet who picks flowers, writes war songs, and gurgles beer.
Is the latter not an accurate depiction of a Dionysian festival? Sounds like the schooling was a bit one-sided if one feels "suddenly" pitted against his fellow countrymen.

[Anonymous No.17616964]

Yeah Dionysus is just a hedonist whit a narrative about how virtuous he is

[Anonymous No.17617003]

>>17616856
Not if the guy is a stuffy, boastful braggart.

[Anonymous No.17617042]

>>17617003
Rudeness and recklessness are not exactly bad things and moral virtue is not exactly a good thing. These two seemingly separate sides tend to form an inseparable whole.

[Anonymous No.17617048]

>>17617042
A wimp is a wimp though.

[Anonymous No.17617087]

>>17617048
What makes de Sade a wimp?

[Anonymous No.17617141]

Romantics feel irrevocably removed from a past time that they want to be apart of, while classicists recognize that there is no time and that each era is is the same with different trappings.

[Anonymous No.17617154]

>>17617087
I'm not talking about de Sade, I'm talking about the German Romantics.

[Anonymous No.17617231]

>>17617154
Ah, so Goethe's statement should be understood explicitly within the context of the Germans?

[KB Scholar !!QeL828ut4fz No.17617258]

>>17617231
According to Kantbot, he was specifically talking about Victor Hugo