The Useless Prophet

Anthony Curtis Adler considers the new translation of Walter Benjamin’s “On Goethe” from Stanford University Press.

By Anthony Curtis AdlerSeptember 16, 2025

• Philosophy & Religion

• Literary Criticism

WALTER BENJAMIN IS widely regarded as one of the greatest critics of the 20th century. Yet, for many, his most fundamental contribution consists in moving criticism away from its traditional objects—works of high art and literature—and toward new media such as film and photography. Benjamin’s work as a literary critic—specifically, as a German literary critic writing about German-language texts—is often ignored, not least because the texts that are the focus of his attention (the exceptions being Brecht and Kafka) are comparatively little known.

Edited by three eminent American scholars of German literature (Susan Bernstein, Peter Fenves, and Kevin McLaughlin), On Goethe (2025) reclaims Benjamin not just as a German writer, whose works offer significant resistance to translation, but as a “Germanist” as well. For, indeed, not only is Benjamin’s intellectual formation incomprehensible if we ignore his roots in Germanistik, but his whole intellectual trajectory also remains incoherent outside of his own participation in a roughly two-century-long project of literary formation, spearheaded by the nascent German middle class, which accompanied Germany’s development from a patchwork of feudal states into a unified modern nation.

A major focus of attention in this regard is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the polymathic poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and natural scientist. As Peter Fenves explains in his introduction, Benjamin “engaged more often with Goethe than with any other German writer and, indeed, with any other writer apart from Baudelaire.” If Hannah Arendt is correct that “Benjamin had a greater affinity with a poet like Brecht than a theoretician like Theodor Adorno” (as Fenves puts it), then it’s even more important to bring Goethe front and center. It is a question not only of supplementing our understanding of Benjamin but also, in a way, of correcting it.

There are many obstacles to such a reclamation. Goethe, despite his status as the most canonical German writer, is little read in English, and the Goethe scholarship to which Benjamin refers is mostly forgotten. On Goethe overcomes these obstacles through copious explanatory endnotes, a useful guide to names, suggestions for further reading, a glossary, and a note on the translation. Fenves’s excellent introduction carefully leads the reader through the various stages of Benjamin’s engagement with Goethe, drawing attention to deeper philosophical questions while also offering a masterful portrait of the intellectual milieu in which Benjamin’s work unfolded.

The greatest obstacle to such a project, at once conceptual and historical, is suggested by Arendt’s observation: if Benjamin had a greater affinity with the poet Goethe, it’s because the concept of criticism guides his work. The value of On Goethe consists not least in allowing for a deepening understanding of Benjamin’s concept of criticism, and especially the relation between truth, criticism, and the work of art.

One of the first fragments gathered in the volume (“Supplements To: On the Symbolic in Cognition”) shows Benjamin’s emerging understanding of criticism as a relation to truth that is on a par with, yet fundamentally different from, philosophy. Rather than concerning itself with truth in its totality—as in Hegel’s system—it seeks the kind of truth that is specific to a single creative work. Goethe, for Benjamin, clearly exemplifies this possibility. His work involves a nonphilosophical, “muse-related insight into truth”—a kind of truth that has nothing to do with the systematic constructions to which his friend Friedrich Schiller aspired but that can only be disclosed through a precise critical approach to a work of art (or, now and then, in the act of creation itself).

But Goethe’s critical method also differs decisively from the early Romantics, the focus of Benjamin’s dissertation. In “Early Romantic Theory of Art and Goethe,” originally published as the dissertation’s appendix, Benjamin draws out the deepest philosophical substratum of their respective concepts of criticism—for the Romantics, the idea; for Goethe, the ideal. Benjamin’s terminology, which is deeply rooted in Kant and German idealism, will certainly give the reader pause, and his argument operates at a very high level of abstraction. The basic point he’s getting at, however, can be put as follows: whereas the Romantic idea encompasses the infinity and unity of all art, which can thus ultimately be understood as belonging to a single continuum, Goethe’s ideal decomposes into an irreducible yet finite “multeity” of pure contents. The Romantic idea, in other words, is oceanic, whereas Goethe’s ideal is archipelagic.

These pure contents, which Goethe will call archetypes, are not themselves concretely present in the work of art but are intuited by the artist in the act of creation. Whereas the Greeks found these archetypal contents in the nine muses, Goethe will seek new sources in visible nature—which, for him, only becomes truly visible through the work of art. Hence his natural-scientific search for “urphenomena”: “the true, intuitable, urphenomenal nature would become reproducibly visible, whereas in the nature of the world, it would be present, to be sure, but concealed (faded by appearance).” Urphenomena remain ideas and not ideas—a “new muse-like canon.”

Romantic infinity is an “infinity in totality,” fulfilling itself in the continuum of works. For Goethe, by contrast, art involves a “unity in multeity,” rediscovered, ever anew, in an irreducible multitude of works. By rejecting an ultimate transcendental totality, Goethe suggests a relation to truth far more opposed to philosophy than Romanticism, whose view of criticism remains determined by a philosophical conception of truth. While denying that the artwork has an intrinsic relation to its own critique, Goethe ultimately presents an even more radical concept of criticism—and truth—than the early Romantics.

This explains Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s theory of science. In “Analysis and Synthesis,” Goethe argues that every application of analysis requires a prior synthesis. This principle, Fenves shows in his introduction, guides Benjamin’s critique of Friedrich Gundolf’s 1916 biographical study of Goethe. Lacking a genuine object given through a true synthesis, Gundolf seizes on a “totally ‘inadequate’ object: ‘the individual Goethe.’” But it also suggests how one can criticize a work of art that, rather than inviting and anticipating critical reflection, seems to hold itself beyond critique, producing powerful immediate emotions instead of disinterested contemplation. For the Romantics, the artwork is caught up in an infinite process of becoming. Just as a living creature sustains itself by devouring and digesting its surroundings, breaking apart in order to build anew, the Romantic work of art is always at once both synthetic and analytic. With the Goethian artwork, however, a chasm separates the primordial act of synthesis—the original creation of the natural archetype, the urphenomena—from the subsequent critical reflection that seeks to intuit the archetype through a careful analysis of the work of art.

This Goethean principle also illuminates the deeper intention of this volume. Far from including “everything Benjamin ever wrote about Goethe,” the writings gathered here offer a genuine synthetic object corresponding to the genesis of Benjamin’s thought. This motivates the editors’ division of Benjamin’s writings into two parts. The first culminates in Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1809), newly translated by Kevin McLaughlin, and is preceded by many smaller writings illuminating the genesis of the famously challenging and enigmatic work. The second begins with a translation of the original German essay Benjamin was commissioned to write for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, followed by an excerpt originally published in German, and many other shorter pieces, including works published pseudonymously after the Nazi seizure of power, as well as two notes from his unfinished magnum opus, the Arcades Project (1927–40). By organizing the materials around the juxtaposition of two works that, written only a few years apart, are so utterly different in character, the editors of On Goethe draw attention to a powerful and productive tension animating Benjamin’s life work.

Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities offers a rigorous application of the mode of criticism developed through his engagement with early Romanticism. While critique differs from mere commentary by seeking the “truth-of-the-matter with regard to an artwork” rather than its “subject-matter,” the artwork’s significance rests on how much the truth of the matter is of a piece with the subject matter. Yet precisely because Goethe’s own concept of the artwork excludes a relation to critique, the critique of Elective Affinities must cut against the grain of the work, contesting its inner tendency toward sensuous nature.

Goethe, like many artists, was himself drawn toward a “mythic” form of existence that rejects a critical attitude toward reality and idolizes nature in the mysterious plenitude of its forms. Yet, with his profound artistic intuition, he would find in nature not just pretty appearances and bucolic charms but also a power that, at once creative and destructive, defies moral categories and remains fundamentally incomprehensible. Rather than fetishizing this power, which he’d come to call the demonic, he sought to save himself from it. The problem with Gundolf’s biography—a main target of Benjamin’s essay—is that it treats Goethe’s life and work as myth, thus reducing literature to a kind of magical script through which demonic, fateful forces are conjured into existence. Benjamin’s essay, by contrast, aims to extract the “luminous kernel of redemptive matter” in Goethe’s novel. This kernel is expressed most powerfully, and enigmatically, in the closing lines of the essay: “Only for the sake of the hopeless is hope given to us.”

Written in a far more accessible style, Benjamin’s article for the Great Soviet Encyclopedia takes a new approach based on historical materialism. Yet the relation between the two works, Fenves suggests, is not simply a polarity but an “elevation” and “intensification.” Historical materialism implies a concept of nature that cannot be simply mythic; the contradictions lying beneath the surface are not demonic or tragic but carry a seed of redemption—the tendency of history toward a transformation. Applying this to the individual author or work, however, is anything but straightforward; it can only be achieved by indirection, through “its historical aftereffect,” as Benjamin puts it in his Moscow diaries.

In other words, it can no longer be a question of an immediate intuition of a simple content but of the nuanced recognition of the way in which the individual author (and work) is bound up with the total historical process. The consequences of this come to light in “Against a Masterpiece,” a critique of Max Kommerell’s The Poet as Führer in German Classicism (1928). Here Benjamin contrasts “synthetic intuition,” now dubbed “theory” (shorthand for “historical materialism”), with the “deceptive lure of immediacy” of Kommerell’s “Anschauung” (“intuition”).

In the earliest fragments assembled in this volume, Benjamin sought to salvage a pure and radical concept of criticism that would not dissolve into the universal truth of philosophy. Such, he now realizes, can no longer take the form of an intuition—not even the kind of intuition an artwork makes possible. Historical materialism aims at such mediated intuition. The most radical critique, which alone is capable of breaking the “spellbinding circle” of myth, of a reading of literature that does not reduce it to an incantation or spell, is only possible as theory.

For all the praise lavished on Goethe, who is represented, not without irony, as leading the age in every sphere of thought but aesthetics, the focus of Benjamin’s essay is Goethe’s incapacity to think coherently about the state as a historical factor, or to “admit to national and social movements.” With just this lack, however, he’s ahead of his times: “[H]is political nihilism went too far for him to dare do more than hint at.” Here Goethe appears no longer as a superlatively gifted participant in the superlatively rich intellectual and artistic culture of his times but as a prophet whose very silence and obscurity suggests the radical potency of his vision. Far from being scandalized by Napoleon’s “program to destroy the German people at its roots,” Goethe would see in it the felicitous anticipation of a community composed of great individuals communicating with each other across centuries and state borders. Goethe, it would seem, is not simply a prophet but a prophet of a world populated only by prophets, radiating spiritual signals far across time and space.

That such an understanding of Goethe corresponds to the deepest intention of Benjamin’s essay becomes clear when Benjamin turns to Faust (1808, 1832) as the “world-tragedy of the German bourgeoisie.” Having abandoned his bourgeois existence in the first of two parts, Faust now finds himself in “imperial courts and ancient palaces” until finally returning to the Catholic heaven, where the seduced, infanticidal Gretchen appears as a penitent. Goethe “saw too deeply” to be satisfied with a “utopian regression” to the Protestant princely absolutism of the 18th century; as if overcoming the aesthetic failings that Benjamin discovered in the German Mourning Play, the baroque of the Counter-Reformation returns in all its glory.

In this return, Benjamin discovers an extraordinary poetic redoubling and intensification of Goethe’s own life:

In a secret utopian intertwining play of agrarian-technical action and artistry with the political apparatus of absolutism, Goethe saw the magic formula by the power of which the reality of social conflicts was supposed to evaporate into nothing. Feudal dominion over farmed lands managed by the bourgeoisie—that is the conflicting image in which Faust’s supreme happiness in life finds expression.

This allows us to understand Benjamin’s new “theoretical” dialectical-material approach, as Fenves suggests, as an intensification of his earlier critical reading. For it shows that Goethe fails in his lifelong struggle against the demonic. Faust II appears as nothing less than a “magical formula”; history appears as already inscribed in nature, and hence as continuous with it—nature loses nothing of its mythic immanence.

The untimely potency of Goethe’s work rests on this seeming failure. Renouncing all identification with the bourgeoisie, refusing the immediate efficacy that such an identification could have brought, Goethe produced a body of work that has “withstood to this very day its dissolution by the bourgeoisie because it could remain ineffectual but could not be falsified or trivialized.” If Goethe, as Benjamin remarks, “placed his whole life in an almost Chinese manner under the category of script,” his deepest tendency is not the conservative, aestheticizing Confucianism that Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum would find in him but a Taoism that discovers in nature’s twisted ways a model for becoming useless to power. The most radical intention of Benjamin’s essay consists in discovering the political sense of this very uselessness: to recognize Goethe as the prophetic poet for the new humanity that can only arrive after the revolution.