Dämonisch, das Dämonische (Daemonic, the Daemonic)

Abstract

Due to their prominence in Goethe’s autobiography (Dichtung und Wahrheit, Poetry and Truth) and in Johann Peter Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe (Conversations with Goethe), Goethe scholarship has associated the lexemes dämonisch and das Dämonische with Goethe’s life, and especially with his seemingly divinely inspired artistic productivity. Yet when these lexemes are considered in relation to the ancient Greek term from which they are derived – δαíμων (German: Dämon; English: daimon or daemon) – they appear as part of a larger tradition in European thought that is concerned with non-rational sources of inspiration, as well as with the limits of reason itself.  Far from offering a consistent theory or concept of the daemonic, Goethe uses this term and its cognates in various ways: to refer to a mysterious and terrifying force that influences one’s life and seems to operate at the nexus between character and fate; as a poetic topos that depicts the relation between the striving subject and its external world; as the morphological core of the personality associated with the tradition of astrology, a core which is seen as the locus of one’s productivity; and as a name or placeholder for phenomena that escape our rational comprehension. Precisely due to the flexibility and ambiguity of these terms, Goethe’s use of them has enjoyed a rich reception in fields as various as theology, religious studies, and philosophy from the nineteenth century until the present.