Goethe and 'Greek love'

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This study will be the first scholarly book on 'homosexuality' in Goethe's thought. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Goethe in almost any discourse on German national identity. Goethe has been mobilised and exploited by almost every ideological movement since his lifetime as a supposed advocate of a particular cause. This study will, more modestly but perhaps with more relevance to our times than such politicising of Goethe, suggest that he can speak to the modern age about the justification for and tolerance of a minority culture that has traditionally been viewed with hostility. In fact, his attitude in many respects anticipates modern, egalitarian homosexual relationships and the more liberal attitude toward them.I use the term 'Greek love' because 1) it is the term most commonly used in the eighteenth century for 'homosexuality' (the other historical term is 'sodomy,' but that has pejorative connotations); 2) its 'otherness' signals the fundamental distinction between a modern understanding of homosexuality (as it developed in the later nineteenth century) and earlier understandings that did not imply a fundamental judgement of character, sexual identity and pathology; 3) it includes conceptually both reciprocal relationships between equal partners and pederastic relationships (though these must be distinguished in the analysis); and 4) Goethe's understanding of same-sex desire - like that of his contemporaries - was decisively informed by knowledge of Classical antiquity, both Greek and Roman (in fact, much of the material for this book was neglected by scholars who had not seen it in the context of these discourses from antiquity).Goethe's views are characterised by a marked openness and liberalism. His general comments on Greek love are often accompanied by reservations regarding its supposed 'unnaturalness' (which usually referred to the supposed threat it presented to reproduction and thus population growth, a common concern in the eighteenth century), but these caveats are generally overshadowed by the overall positive tenor of his assessment. He sometimes attributes Greek love to the supposedly greater beauty of the male (a view common in his time and in antiquity). One of the major themes of the study will be Goethe's struggle to free his thinking from the eighteenth-century reduction of Greek love to pederasty (a tendency supported by the term 'Knabenliebe', 'love of boys', which was often wrongly applied to adult homosexuality) and to describe a relationship between adults of equal status, in other words, to take a decisive step toward modernity. Goethe's comments on particular homosexuals lack the reservations found in his general remarks, and these comments were the ones that Goethe voiced in print. He publicly supported two known 'homosexuals': a famous historian, Johannes von Müller, and especially the founder of modern art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann.