1. Introduction
  2. Allegory versus Symbol
  3. The Immediate Context of Goethe’s Allegory/Symbol Dyad
  4. Allegorical/Symbolic Practice
  5. Reception
  6. Conclusion
  7. Notes
  8. Works Cited and Further Reading

Introduction

Goethe conceived allegory and symbol as contrasting poles of the dyad “sinnliche Darstellung” (representation), most explicitly in his autobiography, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (1811–33; Poetry and Truth). There he wrote of a meaning “die sich bald gegen die symbolische, bald gegen die allegorische Seite hinneigte, je nachdem Anschauung, Gefühl oder Reflexion das Übergewicht behielt” (WA I, 27:103; that tended now toward the symbolic, now toward the allegorical side, depending on whether intuition, feeling, or reflection dominated). The presence of three subjective qualities—intuition, feeling, and reflection—but only two aesthetic categories—symbol and allegory—demonstrates that Goethe conceived of the terms as poles that defined a scale rather than mutually exclusive categories.

Goethe’s most extensive engagement with this polarity took place between 1795 and 1798. This period marked not only the formation of his friendship with Friedrich Schiller and association with the emerging Romantic circle in Jena, but also his most active engagement with idealist philosophy and his work on morphology and optics. He first distinguished allegory from symbol in a draft of his essay “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst” (On the Subjects of the Visual Arts) in 1798. The results eventually found their way into several of his aphorisms related to art in general, science, and epistemology. As the title of that essay makes clear, Goethe introduced these two terms primarily in relation to the visual arts. “Symbol,” to which he sometimes appeared to give preference, was used relatively rarely in literary contexts, and only in Goethe’s 1796 translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions (Essay on Fiction) is “allegory” used consistently in relation to literature. His struggle with Staël’s language coincides exactly with the period during which he composed his essays on the epistemology of science, and a striking parallelism can be discerned between his descriptions of the symbol in art and science. From the Middle Ages through the 18th century, allegorical language and imagery in European art and literature belonged to the religious domain, whose meaning was guaranteed by the Christian cosmos. In the post-enlightenment secularized world, however, truth becomes ineffable, and any object, whether as grand as the Urphänomen (original/primordial phenomenon) or as trivial as the yo-yo, can serve as an allegory, a symbol, or an analogy of everything else.1

Around 1800, the affinities between Goethe’s concepts of allegory and symbol become increasingly apparent due to his more pronounced inclination during this period toward allegorical practice in his writing, including his scientific essays. Recognizing allegory and symbol as complementary terms also sheds light on the fundamental sympathy between Goethe and the Romantics, particularly the Schlegel brothers, in their shared affinity for allegorical style. As Goethe’s distinction passed through F. W. J. Schelling’s Philosophie der Kunst (1802–03/59; Lectures on the Philosophy of Art) to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s popular lectures on aesthetics and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Statesman’s Manual (1816), what had been a flexible scale became a rigid distinction, such that symbol effectively displaced allegory and became the dominant term for the literary ‘sign’ in Germany and Western culture more generally. Only with the post-modernist turn to allegory (Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man) did the term return to respectability, and then only in a more skeptical understanding than Goethe presents either allegory or symbol.

Allegory versus Symbol

Though Goethe’s distinction between allegory and symbol became a virtual cliché, “allegory” as a critical term was always a given for Goethe, not something that required substantial reflection.2 Both terms occur without much distinction in the Germanic aesthetic debates of the 18th century. Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1799), for instance, defined allegory as “ein natürliches Zeichen, oder ein Bild, insofern es an die Stelle der bezeichneten Sache gesetzt wird” (a natural sign, or an image, insofar as it is set in the place of the designated object), and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) uses the formulation “symbolische Allegorie” in 1792.3 But it is the great promoter of allegory, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), who is commonly recognized as the precursor to Goethe’s concept of the symbol. His ekphrastic and empathetic descriptions (re)presented ancient statues as quasi-vital organic beings that appear “in sich selbst vollendet” (perfect in themselves) and charged with meaning, “ohne daß diese Bedeutung über den Weg einer Semiose erst mühsam gesichert werden müßte – wie im Falle der Allegorie” (yet without ascertaining this meaning through the detour of semiosis – as is the case with allegory).4 Goethe followed the discussions of the naturalness versus arbitrariness of allegories raised by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786);5 and, like Herder and Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793), he used the term symbol as an essentially rationalist equivalent for allegory.6 Only in the late 1790s did Goethe begin to draw a clear distinction between allegory and symbol.

Goethe first expressed this distinction for public consideration in his draft essay, “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst,” which was a collaborative work with the Swiss painter and art critic Johann Heinrich Meyer (1760–1832). However, Meyer replaced Goethe’s draft with his own, different, version under the same title in the first issue of his and Goethe’s new art periodical Propyläen in 1798. Meyer’s text distinguishes allegorical from symbolic genres in painting based on their degree of abstraction (allegories represent truths, symbols represent divinities),7 whereas Goethe’s draft draws for the first time a modal rather than generic distinction. Since Goethe had discussed the material at length with Schiller (letter of August 16, 1797) and in conversations with August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and their circle, his then unpublished distinction became, in fact, the more influential position. Symbolic art, Goethe says, represents differently:

So werden die Gegenstände denn bestimmt: Durch tiefes Gefühl, das, wenn es rein und natürlich ist, mit den besten und höchsten Gegenständen koinzidieren und allenfalls sie symbolisch machen wird. Die auf diese Weise dargestellten Gegenstände scheinen bloß für sich zu stehen und sind doch wieder im Tiefsten bedeutend, und das wegen des Idealen, das immer eine Allgemeinheit mit sich führt. Wenn das Symbolische außer der Darstellung noch etwas bezeugt, so wird es immer auf indirekte Weise geschehen. (WA I, 47:94)
Objects are determined thus: Through profound feeling that, if it is pure and natural, coincides with the best and highest objects and will make them then symbolic. Objects represented in this way seem to stand only for themselves and yet are also profoundly significant, and that is because of the ideal, which always brings with it a certain generality. If a symbol testifies to something beyond its representation, that takes place only indirectly.

By contrast, Goethe associates allegory with Rococo ornament, with “Kunstwerke, die durch Verstand, Witz, Galanterie brillieren” (ibid. 94–95; works of art that glitter with cleverness, wit, gallantry), to conclude, “Das Allegorische unterscheidet sich vom Symbolischen, daß dieses indirekt, jenes direkt bezeichnet” (ibid. 95; allegory differs from symbol in that it signifies indirectly and allegory signifies directly). Allegories are direct and natural, symbols indirect and emotive. In other words, allegory engages the viewer’s judgment, understanding, and knowledge of tradition, while symbols require the creative contribution of the viewer’s reason and intuition to interpret (rather than merely comprehend) what by nature cannot be articulated.

The distinction was further generalized as contrasting processes or styles of poetic creativity in two aphorisms published in volumes 5.2 and 5.3 of Über Kunst und Alterthum (On Art and Antiquity) in 1825 and 1826 respectively:

Das ist die wahre Symbolik, wo das Besondere das Allgemeinere repräsentirt, nicht als Traum und Schatten, sondern als lebendig-augenblickliche Offenbarung des Unerforschlichen. (WA I, 42.2:151–52)
True symbolism is where the specific represents the general, not as dream or shadow, but as a living-momentary revelation of the ineffable.

And:

Es ist ein grosser Unterschied, ob der Dichter zum Allgemeinen das Besondere sucht oder im Besondern das Allgemeine schaut. Aus jener Art entsteht Allegorie, wo das Besondere nur als Beispiel, als Exempel des Allgemeinen gilt; die letztere aber ist eigentlich die Natur der Poesie, sie spricht ein Besonderes aus, ohne an’s Allgemeine zu denken oder darauf hinzuweisen. Wer nun dieses Besondere lebendig fasst, erhält zugleich das Allgemeine mit, ohne es gewahr zu werden, oder erst spät. (WA I, 42.2:146)
There is a great difference whether a poet seeks a specific equivalent for the general or sees the general in the specific. The first mode gives rise to allegory, where the specific functions only as an example, a model of the general; the second is actually the nature of poetry: it articulates something specific without thinking about or pointing to the general. Whoever comprehends this specific as alive receives the general along with it, without noticing it, at least not at first.

With this extension to representing the ineffable, creating and reading such signs becomes itself a form of epistemology, both for the author and the reader. The distinction between allegory and symbol now begins to designate a degree of poetic achievement; “the nature of poetry” means the greatest poetry, the value that symbols came to carry for the 19th century.

The following terser versions, which are routinely cited, were published not in Goethe’s lifetime, but only from his Nachlass (literary estate) in Max Hecker’s collection from 1907:8

Die Allegorie verwandelt die Erscheinung in einen Begriff, den Begriff in ein Bild, doch so, daß der Begriff im Bilde immer noch begrenzt und vollständig zu halten und zu haben und an demselben anzusprechen sei. (Maximen und Reflexionen 1112)
Allegory transforms appearance into a concept, the concept into an image, but in such fashion that the concept remains delimited and complete and comprehensible within the image.

And:

Die Symbolik verwandelt die Erscheinung in Idee, die Idee in ein Bild, und so, daß die Idee im Bild immer wirksam und unerreichbar bleibt und, selbst in allen Sprachen ausgesprochen, doch unaussprechlich bliebe. (Maximen und Reflexionen 1113)
Symbolism transforms appearance into idea, the idea into an image, and in such fashion that the idea in the image always remains powerful and unreachable and, even if uttered in every language, would still remain inexpressible.

Hecker’s versions are much dryer; they leave out “das Allgemeine,” “die Natur der Poesie,” “Traum,” and “das Unerforschliche”—the more Romantic language of the finest achievements of Goethe’s late poetry and what he considered to be his most important and ‘mature’ scientific contribution, the Farbenlehre (1810; Theory of Color). That Goethe chose instead the versions published in Über Kunst und Alterthum reflects the importance of the more fluid idealist philosophical vocabulary to his final conception of this distinction. And indeed, according to Stockhammer, after formulating this distinction in the 1798 essay with Meyer, Goethe continued to use the terms inconsistently and to intermingle them to the end of his life, with “symbol” more prevalent in scientific contexts.9 Furthermore, Goethe only rarely extended his distinction between allegory and symbol beyond the visual arts to poetry, and never rigidly: regarding both, he often used allegory and symbol interchangeably. Stockhammer’s evidence implies the opposite of the orthodox view; it hardly suggests that Goethe had much stake in the distinction or that he intended to make allegory unrespectable into the 21st century. Indeed, Paul de Man, in introducing his post-modern turn to allegory, allows that “even in the case of Goethe, the choice in favor of the symbol is accompanied by all kinds of reservations and qualification.”10

The Immediate Context of Goethe’s Allegory/Symbol Dyad

What sparked Goethe’s sudden interest in this area of aesthetics during the last years of the 18th century? In the case of allegory, Goethe could draw from a long tradition in aesthetics, rhetoric, and poetics. Allegory has been regarded as the prototype of indirect signification based on arbitrary conventions since antiquity. Winckelmann utilized allegory as a hermeneutical concept for his history of visual ancient artworks, while Goethe applied the term to romance literature in his translation of Germaine de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions in 1795. In the case of the symbol, however, no such tradition in aesthetics and poetics exists. Symbol was originally a term reserved for mythology and theology until Kant redefined it as an intuitive form of (re)presentation in the aesthetic section of his Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of Judgment).

Goethe’s engagement with Kant is consistently associated with his famous friendship with Schiller. In late 1790, almost four years before they became friends, Goethe realized he had to come to terms with the new philosophy (partly in response to a conversation with Schiller) and began to study the Kritik der Urteilskraft. It follows, then, that Schiller’s letter to Goethe on August 31, 1794, which initiated their close working relationship, is framed in Kantian language: Schiller characterizes Goethe as an “intuitive” spirit, whereas he casts his own mind as reflective and “eigentlich mehr symbolisierend” (Gedenkausgabe 20:19; actually more symbolizing). These attributes clearly come from §59 of the Kritik der Urteilskraft, even if Schiller reverses Kant’s understanding of their relation.11 For Kant, symbol is a form of hypotyposis, a genuinely rhetorical-poetical operation through which a “Begriff, den nur die Vernunft denken, und dem keine sinnliche Anschauung angemessen sein kann” (B 255; a concept which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate), can gain “indirekte Darstellung [. . .] vermittelst einer Analogie (zu welcher man sich auch empirischer Anschauungen bedient)” (B 256; indirect presentations of the concept [. . .] by means of an analogy (for which empirical intuitions are also employed)).

What Kant identifies as a symbol or an operation of symbolization, the arts and hermeneutic philology traditionally called allegory. The difference between allegory and symbol depends on the degree of conventionality of the attributes in relation to the concept they represent. The more freely the imagination acts in composing an attributive intuition to represent a concept, the more symbolic (and less allegorical) is the created representation. Kant defined this in §49 as an “ästhetische Idee [. . .], welche mit einer solchen Mannigfaltigkeit der Teilvorstellungen in dem freien Gebrauch [der Einbildungskraft] verbunden ist, daß für sie kein Ausdruck, der einen bestimmten Begriff bezeichnet, gefunden werden kann” (B 198; aesthetic idea [. . .], which is combined with such a manifold of partial representations in the free use of the imagination that no expression designating a determinate concept can be found for it). To apply another relevant Kantian distinction to this process of representation, it follows that: If determined judgment is sufficient, the representation of a concept merely amounts to a commonly and traditionally understood allegorical combination of conventional signs, but if the repertoire of established attributive images falls short, then the mind must resort to reflective judgment and engage the freely operating imagination to create an aesthetic idea, resulting in symbolic hypotyposis.

In retaining the connection between symbol and allegory, Goethe evidently takes his own direct line to Kant, with whom he was already struggling in developing his own epistemology of science in the early 1790s (to which we shall return below). But the actual term “symbol,” which Schiller had claimed for himself in his 1794 letter to Goethe, enters Goethe’s usage in a letter to Schiller with explicit reference to their discussions of aesthetics while simultaneously shifting to a more general humanistic discourse:

Ich habe daher die Gegenstände, die einen solchen [sentimentalischen] Effekt hervorbringen, genau betrachtet und zu meiner Verwunderung bemerkt, daß sie eigentlich symbolisch sind. Das heißt, [. . .] es sind eminente Fälle, die, in einer charakteristischen Mannigfaltigkeit, als Repräsentanten von vielen anderen dastehen, eine gewisse Totalität in sich einschließen, eine gewisse Reihe fordern, Ähnliches und Fremdes in meinem Geiste aufregen und so von außen wie von innen an eine gewisse Einheit und Allheit Anspruch machen. Sie sind also, was ein glückliches Sujet dem Dichter ist, glückliche Gegenstände für den Menschen [. . .]. (Gedenkausgabe 20:395)
I have thus noticed, to my amazement, that objects which elicit such [sentimental] effects, actually are symbolic. That is, [. . .] they are striking examples that stand, in their characteristic multifariousness, as representatives of many others, contain in themselves a certain totality, require a certain sequence, arouse similar and different aspects in my mind, and so lay claim from outside and from inside to a certain unity and totality. As such, they are, just as a fortunate subject matter is for the poet, fortunate objects for humans […].

By characterizing this as “was Sie selbst so schön entwickelt haben” (395–96; what you have developed so beautifully) and “was zwischen uns Sprachgebrauch ist” (396; what has become common language among us), Goethe evidently refers to Schiller’s essay “Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung” (1795; On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry). In this essay, Schiller contrasts Goethe’s alleged poetic naïveté with his own sentimentality. Initially, Schiller introduced the terms “naïve” and “sentimental” as a strict dichotomy; however, in the final installment of the essay’s third part (as originally published in his journal Die Horen) he suggests their friendship might prevent both from falling into extremes. Ironically assuming Schiller’s original position after three years of friendly collaboration, Goethe proves his ability to adapt and transform. In becoming both an intuitive-naïve poet and a reflective-sentimental thinker, he fulfills for his part what Schiller had demanded from the modern artist.

Striking linguistic parallels between the descriptions of what is sentimental and what is symbolic suggest the importance of reflection and thus of a temporal distance between the emotion and experience upon which the symbol is based.12 This sort of sentimentality may have motivated Goethe to describe more than ten years after Schiller’s death the beginning of their friendship in “Glückliches Ereignis” (1817; Fortunate Occurrence), which he characterizes as a coming to terms with the equivalence between Goethe’s “Erfahrung” (experience) and Schiller’s “Idee” (idea) to characterize the “symbolic” plant he sketched during their first significant encounter (for more, see our aside below). In retrospect, the metamorphosis of plants became for Goethe a sentimental symbol of their friendship.

However, this theory of vegetal morphogenesis can be also viewed as a symbol for Goethe’s epistemology of science in general. Indeed, Goethe’s practice of scientific inquiry—beginning already in the 1780s, he had been pursuing botanical, anatomical, optical, geological, and meteorological studies—significantly contributed to his conception of symbol. In opposition to the Newtonian scientific practice of “experimentum crucis,” he developed a methodology of serial experimentation based on systematic observation that combines all the characteristics of symbol listed in the cited letter to Schiller: multifariousness, representation, sequence, unity, and totality. This scientific epistemology reached its culminating formulation in “Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt” (1793; The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject): “Zwei Versuche können scheinen auseinander zu folgen, wenn zwischen ihnen doch noch eine große Reihe stehen müßte, um sie in eine rechte Verbindung zu bringen” (FA I.25:30; Two experiments can appear to follow from one another and yet a whole series should lie between them to show the natural connections). When the experiential gap of observation has been closed through the “Vermannigfachung eines jeden einzelnen Versuches” (ibid. 33; multiplication of each single experiment) and has established “eine Reihe von Versuchen” (a series of experiments), such that “man sie alle genau kennt und übersieht” (one knows and surveys them all) at once, these experiments form “gleichsam nur Einen Versuch” (virtually only One experiment) and coalesce into what Goethe calls “eine Erfahrung der höheren Art” (ibid. 34; a heightened experience). And when the researcher formulates this “higher kind” of experience by describing the outcome of this series of experiments “in kurze und faßliche Sätze” (ibid. 35; in short and concise sentences), he has created a corresponding virtual phenomenon from an intricate complex of singular objects that can be further enhanced by conjoining the heightened experiences into a new series of combinations. Such a heightened phenomenon thus amounts to one of the “eminent cases” that represent a law of nature, a term that would later expand to “Urphänomen” and eventually, in discussion with Schiller, “symbol.”

Goethe acknowledges that this procedure of forming an individual whole can be conducted with the greatest liberty of “understanding, imagination, and wit” (ibid. 35–36). Obviously, such a procedure no longer exclusively belongs to the process of scientific inquiry but moves into the domain of artistic creation. Consequently, it is in the visual arts where Goethe draws a clear line of distinction between allegorical and symbolic artworks, but this distinction can only be fully understood when viewed against the scientific background just outlined. For Goethe, as stated in “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst,” the “best and highest objects” of visual arts must meet two conditions: a) They must be heightened, “pure and natural” phenomena (FA I.18:443) and as such represent an autonomous totality within themselves; b) When composed in a cycle (such as the nine muses of Apollo) or as a group (such as the figures of Laocoon statue), the artist must combine the individual figures with a deep feeling for their interrelations and in pursuit of a higher ideal of reason, “um den Gegenstand in seinem gesamten Umfange zu übersehen, den höchsten darstellenden Moment zu finden, und ihn also aus seiner beschränkten Wirklichkeit herauszuheben” (“Über Laokoon” 1797; On Laocoon), FA I.18:490; to survey the object or topic in its fullness and figure out the best moment for its presentation, so that the artwork raises the object above the limitations of its reality). Artworks that fulfill these criteria are “symbolic,” whereas those that are combined merely with (conventional) understanding and wit display no intrinsic notion of emotional realism and reasonable idealism and therefore are “allegorical.” It is precisely this layering, or perhaps better, this bundling of authentic heightened phenomena that—even when they are drawn from different disciplines—is so characteristic and unique to Goethe’s way of thinking.

If Schiller is responsible for Goethe’s adoption of the term “symbol,” and symbol implies the blending of reflection with intuitive perception, then what about allegory? Goethe contrasts allegory and symbol in maxims, as we have already seen, but it remains for him an exclusively aesthetic term, rather than a general philosophical term; he uses it in the context of the visual arts and only one limited instance in relation to literature. The answer to the above question lies in a less well-known impulse for the allegory/symbol distinction, namely Goethe’s translation of de Staël’s Essai sur les fictions, which he composed just as he was finishing Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), and during which time he was engaged in ongoing discussion with Schiller on the relation of the novel to the epic. Staël categorizes novelistic writing from the 15th into the 18th centuries as “allegorical romance,” the foil against which she defines the modern social novel focused on the moral development of the passions of the individual in a real world (Richardson, Fielding, Rousseau, and Goethe’s Werther). Indeed, according to the Goethe-Wörterbuch, 17 of the 70 occurrences of “allegory” in Goethe’s writings come from the Staël translation. She portrays a shift in the work of imagination from allegory, with its pleasurable ornamental grace (i.e., the rococo quality evoked in Goethe’s 1798 draft), to the imitation of real life, which for her means the imitation of things seen, as opposed to feelings (as in the modern “unconscious” that cannot be fully articulated or understood).13 In an exchange of letters in 1797, Goethe demands “ideal form” for a symbolic object; in response, Schiller requires the “Verdrängung der gemeinen Nachahmung” (elimination of ordinary imitation).14 The formulation of allegory vs. symbol in Goethe’s draft of 1798 in effect reformulates Staël’s trajectory from romance to social novel as the dyad allegory/symbol and thus suggests that allegory, for Goethe, embodies the imaginative, narrative aspects that Schiller associated with intuition and naïveté.15

Allegorical/Symbolic Practice

Goethe’s steadfast commitment to analogy suggests that he can never have wandered too far from allegory as a mode of representation and that his practice covers a relatively continuous spectrum from clearly traditional allegory to intuitive symbols. Since the mid-20th century, there has been increasing awareness of Goethe’s legibly allegorical practice, especially in Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil (1832; Faust: The Second Part of the Tragedy).16 Less widely acknowledged but equally important is that Goethe had already written throughout his career traditionally legible allegories and many modern unintelligible ones, that is, allegories whose meaning is so profound as to be inarticulable. Already in the 1770s and 1780s, his dramatic and narrative practice includes allegorical elements in the form of supernatural and mythical characters, speaking names, characters standing in for other characters, and uses of the supernatural in the manner of baroque drama. He continued the active practice of court masque at the Weimar court, where from 1781 to as late as 1828 he, alongside lesser writers, wrote and produced masques for occasions of varying degrees of formality. The masques and mythological allegories of Faust II function not only as historical allusions but also continue a living dramatic tradition. The tradition of allegorical and mythological drama continued through the 19th century everywhere in Europe in the form of opera, which in Goethe’s day was no longer exclusively a form of court entertainment, but in fact a strong influence on spoken drama as well.17 In a letter to Goethe from December 29, 1797, Schiller turns to opera as the basis of what he calls their new symbolizing rhetoric in drama (Gedenkausgabe 20:480). In narrative, allegory often blends into symbol, from the waif Mignon—part puppet, part maiden, part angel—in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, through the sage Makarie, first presented to Wilhelm from behind a rising curtain in Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years). Like many figures in Goethe’s late works, Makarie leads a double life, as both the boring mistress of an archive and a completely fantastical astronomical object spiraling out of the solar system. The temporal distance associated with the sentimental symbol is obvious when Lothario apparently encounters his former beloved on the same day as a young woman and as a mature mother. This “symbol” is immediately allegorized with a comparison to an orange grove in which buds, flowers, and fruit are to be found simultaneously. This is a symbol provided with an allegorical reading. Similar examples appear in Hermann und Dorothea (1796/97; Hermann and Dorothea), when Hermann proposes marriage to Dorothea using his mother’s wedding ring (temporal distance, renewal) and she places it on her finger next to the ring given to her by her fiancé before he died in the French Revolution (a previous beloved)—two identical objects with the same meaning, symbol and allegory simultaneously. Goethe’s poetic work typically hovers between parody and profundity, in effect between allegory, with its allusions to a past tradition, and symbol, with its allusions to an inscrutable present and future. Goethe’s practice is a wealth of allegorical symbolic representation, not in Herder’s sense, but in Goethe’s own thought-through sense.

Similarly, despite Goethe’s preference for “symbol” as a scientific term, even his scientific writing never quite leaves allegory behind. Goethe’s objective style, in both literary and scientific writing, increasingly exploits personification to avoid static and passive verbs, as, for example, in the title “Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt.” In his essays, as well as in his narrative and dramatic works, objects and ideas live and act on the stage of the mind, just as the personifications of human passions and principles of the cosmos paraded on the European stage from the Middle Ages into Goethe’s own day in court masques and prologues. Personification and dramatic allegory concretize what is seen or visualize what cannot be seen. In this sense, they are concrete in the same way as are symbols that throw off their husks and take on living meaning. Put simply, both terms boil down to analogy according to Goethe’s well-known aphorism:

Jedes Existirende ist ein Analogon alles Existirenden; daher erscheint uns das Dasein immer zu gleicher Zeit gesondert und verknüpft. Folgt man der Analogie zu sehr, so fällt alles identisch zusammen; meidet man sie, so zerstreut sich alles in's Unendliche. In beiden Fällen stagnirt die Betrachtung, einmal als überlebendig, das anderemal als getödtet. (WA II, 11:126)
Everything that exists is an analogy of everything that exists; hence being always appears to us to be simultaneously separated and connected. Too much attention to analogies makes everything collapse into identity; too little attention, and everything scatters into infinity. In both cases observation stagnates: now from too much activity, now from none at all.

All existence, for Goethe, is full of dichotomies that threaten either to blow apart or to collapse into each other; analogy defines a scale between poles, any point of which enables a unique insight or perspective into a cosmos in constant motion (see Gleichnis). Allegory, which points directly, gives way to symbol, which points indirectly. Overwhelmingly Christian since the Middle Ages, European allegory was structured and justified by Christian mythology and doctrine, to which the representation of divinities in classical art had also been subsumed. As the secularization of intellectual life radically accelerated in the Enlightenment and afterward, God went from being an absent, invisible clockmaker to finally disappearing or, even in Nietzsche’s day, dying. As God became ever more inscrutable, allegory lost its claim to general significance. Goethe’s dyad allegory/symbol was the perfect historicist solution to this shift. By invoking the general power of analogy, it fulfilled a real need for representing the inscrutable and at the same time preserved the connection to the historical context of that need.

Reception

In his day, Goethe was at the center of intense literary and philosophical discussions, as both a topic of and as a participant in the German Romantic movement. As a government minister responsible for the University of Jena, he brought natural scientists and idealist philosophers—Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848), J. G. Fichte (1762–1814), Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831)—to the faculty. He spent much of his time in the 1790s going back and forth between Weimar and Jena, where he participated regularly in discussions at the university and was also a regular in the early Romantic circle around Caroline Schlegel (shortly to become, with Goethe's assistance, Caroline Schelling). Goethe’s strongest connection with Schelling was their common interest in Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature), in which they shared an at least analogous understanding of the symbol. Schelling’s discussion of nature as a symbol of the Absolute in his Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature), which Goethe read in in January 1798, was obviously congenial just at this time:

in der erscheinenden Natur [. . .] das Absolute verhüllt sich [. . .] in [. . .] ein Endliches, ein Seyn, welches sein Symbol ist, und als solches, wie alles Symbol, ein von dem was es bedeutet unabhängiges Leben annimmt. In der ideellen Welt legt es die Hülle gleichsam ab, es erscheint als was es ist [. . .].18
in visible nature [. . .] the Absolute cloaks itself [. . .] in [. . .] something finite, a being, which is its symbol, and as such, like anything symbolic, takes on a life independent of what it means. In the ideal world it lays its covering aside again, it appears as what it is [. . .].

Indeed, in this case, Schelling seems rather in dialogue with Goethe, since his interest in “cloaking” evokes the poem “So laß mich scheinen, bis ich werde” (So let me appear until I become) at the end of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in which Mignon will drop her “reine Hülle” (pure husk) to enter eternity. In his lectures on art in 1802 and 1803, Schelling promulgated a more complex view of the image as divisible into schema, allegory, and symbol, but he retained Goethe’s sense that the border between allegory and symbol was porous.19 While allegory was generally denigrated in favor of symbol in the 19th century, the German Romantics often prioritized allegory.

Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) published an important and enthusiastic review of the Lehrjahre in 1798 and then became a noisy proponent of a new, uninterpretable kind of allegory as the new Romantic mode that is embodied in various Romantic fairy tales (responding to Goethe’s), in novels by Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Friedrich von Hardenberg/Novalis (1772–1801), Clemens Brentano (1778–1842), Joseph von Eichendorff (1788–1857), and others, and especially in his own novel Lucinde (1799). Already in 1802, the manuscript of August Wilhelm Schlegel’s translations of the allegorical Spanish Golden Age dramatist Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) inspired Goethe. Goethe then encouraged several further translations of Calderón’s plays into German and wove numerous Calderonian allusions and techniques into his own plays, beginning with Die natürliche Tochter (1803; The Natural Daughter), which begins with the heroine falling from a runaway horse, an echo of the opening of Calderón’s most famous play, La vida es sueño (1635; Life is a Dream).

The paradoxical concreteness (or objecthood) of symbols, with their simultaneously implicit higher meaning, provoked extended discussion in the ensuing century. In Germany, the discussion flowed into the development of hermeneutics and literary criticism; the milestone on hermeneutics is Hans-Georg Gadamer's analysis in Wahrheit und Methode (1960; Truth and Method), which discusses Kant’s subjectivization of aesthetics and the subsequent “rehabilitation” of allegory—initiated by Goethe’s concept of the symbol—by the Romantics, who transferred to symbolism the metaphysical horizon that was supposed to have been rejected along with the concept of the allegory.20 In England, Coleridge’s defense of the Bible in a faithless age in his Statesman’s Manual (1816) was particularly influential:

an allegory is but a translation of abstract notions into a picture language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of the senses; [. . .] both alike unsubstantial [. . .] On the other hand a symbol [. . .] is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal.21

This formulation became the shibboleth of meaning in poetry in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries, not for its pronounced religious reinterpretation of Schelling’s notion of the Absolute (das Unbedingte), but for its absolute denigration of allegory. Only in the second half of the 20th century did allegory become respectable again beyond Medieval and Renaissance Studies. The German version of this development is well summarized by Stockhammer;22 a widely influential Anglo-French version of this development can be found in Paul de Man’s essay, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which appeared in 1969. German scholars who have ‘rediscovered’ allegory do so explicitly with reference to Goethe (Benjamin, Heinz Schlaffer, Gerhard Kurz, Wilhelm Emrich), while de Man begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778). Neither strand of discussion relates Goethe’s concept of the allegory to its historical tradition, as argued by Brown.23 In effect, Goethe became the patron saint for the superiority of the symbol, an orthodoxy to which he himself did not subscribe.

Conclusion

In recent years, attempts have been made to overcome “die leidige Debatte über Symbol und Allegorie” (the exasperating debate about symbol and allegory) and to reestablish each concept individually.24 Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht’s edited volume Aktualität des Symbols (2005; Continued Relevance of the Symbol) explores not just the semiotic, aesthetic, and rhetorical potential of the symbol, but also aims for a wider rehabilitation of it as a valuable concept for describing and criticizing specific cultural formations: “Erst heute, nach dem allmählichen Verblassen der poststrukturalistischen Bilderverbote, kann die von Cassirer [in der Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923/29)] markierten Systemstelle ‘Symbol’ neu besetzt werden” (Only today, now that poststructuralist iconoclasm has gradually lessened, can we recuperate the node in the system that Cassirer marked as “symbol”).25 Concerning allegory, a similar edited volume appeared with the expressed goal to tap into the potential that postmodern practices, such as the fragment and the collage, opened for a return of this self-reflective mode of signification in cultural studies and history.26 Along similar lines, some contributors to this volume attack the “notorische Entgegensetzung von Symbol und Allegorie” (notorious juxtaposition of symbol and allegory).27 Yet it is symptomatic in both cases that the repressed ‘other’ of the dyad allegory/symbol, when conceived as a dichotomy, constantly recurs. This entry’s survey of symbol/allegory in Goethe’s thought and work makes evident that Goethe conceived this pair rather as a cultural Urphänomen according to which symbol and allegory mark the poles of a tense yet inseparable relationship, akin to a positive and negative charge in the physical Urphänomen of magnetism. It would be more fruitful, therefore, to consider symbol and allegory as forming a conceptual and reciprocal dyad, in the sense of Wechselseitigkeit (reciprocity), rather than pitting the one against the other.

  1. On the yo-yo, see Richard J. Browne and M. C. Davis, “Goethe and the Yo-Yo,” Modern Language Quarterly 14 (1953): 98–101. ↩
  2. There is general agreement on this point; see Gero von Wilpert, Goethe-Lexicon (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1998), 18–19, Robert Stockhammer in the Goethe-Handbuch, vol. 4, ed. Hans-Dietrich Dahnke and Regina Otto (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1996), 17–18 and 1030–33, and Horst Umbach in the Goethe-Wörterbuch (1:350–58). ↩
  3. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig: 1771), 1:27; Johann Gottfried Herder, “Über Denkmale der Vorwelt. Zweites Stück,” in Zerstreute Blätter (Gotha: C. W. Ettingen, 1792), 4:223–62. ↩
  4. Heinz J. Drügh, “‘Allenthalben auf seiner Oberfläche.’ Zur Präsenz des Körpers im klassizistischen Symbol,” in Aktualität des Symbols, edited Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht (Freiburg i.B.: Rombach, 2005), 146. ↩
  5. Horst Umbach, “Allegorie,” in Goethe-Wörterbuch, 1:350. ↩
  6. Robert Stockhammer, “Symbol,” in Goethe-Handbuch, 4/2: 1030. ↩
  7. Goethe, “Über die Gegenstände der bildenden Kunst,” Propyläen 1.1: 20–54. Allegory is defined on p. 39, symbol on p. 49. For a detailed analysis of the difference between Goethe’s concept and Meyer’s published essay, see Bengt Sørensen, Symbol und Symbolismus in den ästhetischen Theorien des 18. Jahrhunderts und der deutschen Romantik (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1963), 108–12. ↩
  8. Goethe’s aphorisms were only partly published during his lifetime; the standard numbering system derives from the edition by Max Hecker, Maximen und Reflexionen (Weimar: Verlag der Goethe-Gesellschaft, 1907). ↩
  9. Robert Stockhammer, “Symbol,” in Goethe-Handbuch, 4/2: 1032. ↩
  10. Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983), 189. ↩
  11. Indeed, Kant had insisted: “Es ist ein von den neuern Logikern zwar angenommener, aber sinnverkehrter Gebrauch des Wortes symbolisch, wenn man es der intuitiven Vorstellungsart entgegensetzt; denn die symbolische ist nur eine Art der intuitiven” (B 255; The use of the word symbolic in contrast to the intuitive kind of representation has been accepted by more recent logicians, but this is a distorted and incorrect use of the word, for the symbolic is merely a species of the intuitive). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, in Werkausgabe in 12 Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedel (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996), 10:295. (Henceforth cited in the text with reference to the pagination of the second edition B, as is common practice.) ↩
  12. Mattias Pirholt analyzes these parallels in Grenzerfahrungen (Heidelberg: Winter, 2018), 57–103. ↩
  13. As argued in Jane K. Brown, Goethe’s Allegories of Identity (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2014). For the discussion of Rousseau, see esp. pp. 3–52. ↩
  14. Goethe, Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche. 28 August 1949, vol. 20, ed. Karl Schmidt (Zurich: Artemis, 1964), 395 (August 16, 1797), and 480 (December 29, 1797). WA 4.12:243–47. ↩
  15. Brown discusses Staël’s text in greater detail in “Allegory in Continental Romanticism,” forthcoming in Oxford Handbook of Allegory, ed. David Parry (Oxford: Oxford UP, forthcoming). ↩
  16. The fact has been recognized in a variety of ways, among others by Friedrich Theodor Vischer in his Faust. Der Tragödie dritter Teil (1862), Wilhelm Emrich in Die Symbolik von Faust II (1943), Heinz Schlaffer in Faust zweiter Teil: Die Allegorie des 19. Jahrhunderts (1981), Jane K. Brown in Faust: The German Tragedy (1986). ↩
  17. Detailed in Brown, The Persistence of Allegory (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P, 2007), 152–221. ↩
  18. F.W.J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-61), I.2:67. ↩
  19. Schelling, Die Philosophie der Kunst, Part One, paragraph 39. ↩
  20. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode (Tübingen: Mohr, 1965), 39–77, esp. 66–76. ↩
  21. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons ed. R. J. White (London and Princeton: Routledge and Princeton UP: 1972), 30. ↩
  22. Robert Stockhammer, “Symbol,” in Goethe-Handbuch, 4/2: 1032-33. ↩
  23. Cf. Brown, Persistence of Allegory and Goethe’s Allegories of Identity (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). ↩
  24. Eva Geulen, “Making Symbols – Doing Gender. Vor- und Nachgeschichte des Symbols (G.W.F. Hegel, Judith Butler),” in Aktualität des Symbols, ed. Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht (Freiburg i.B.: Rombach, 2005), 322. ↩
  25. Frauke Berndt, “Symbol/Theorie,” in Aktualität des Symbols, ed. Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht (Freiburg i.B.: Rombach, 2005), 8. ↩
  26. Ulla Haselstein, ed. Allegorie: DFG-Symposion 2014 (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2016), x. ↩
  27. Bettina Menke, “Allegorie: ‘Ostentation der Faktur’ und ‘Theorie’” in Allegorie: DFG-Symposion 2014, ed. Ulla Haselstein (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2016), 116. ↩

Works Cited and Further Reading