Philosophy as a way of life

And yet, when high above us, lost in vast blue spaces The skylark sings her warbling tune,

It is inborn in every man,

That his mind surges onwards and upwards.

To the casual reader, this text seems to be nothing more than a dream about flying: the banal desire, innate in every human being, to be able to fly. A mere topos, in other words, as historians are often only too quick to categorize it.

In fact, however, the theme of the flight of the soul plays a role of extraordinary importance in Goethe, as we can already glimpse from the following lines of his letter to Schiller of May 1 2, 1 798: "Your letter found me

in the Iliad, to which I

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always return with delight. It is always as if one were in a balloon, far above everything earthly; as if one were truly in that intermediate :1.one where the gmls 11111&1 hither 1111d t hither. " ' In filct, num

The Vie11J from Above

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had succeeded in freeing himself from the weight of the earth only a few years previously. The Montgolfier brothers had carried out their first flight on November 2 1 , 1 783. Goethe had been deeply impressed by this event, and in an entirely unexpected way, this experience helped him to understand Homeric poetry.

Besides the events they narrate, the Homeric epics show us the whole world from the point of view of the gods, who look down upon mankind's battles and passions from the heights of the heavens or the mountaintops, without, however, being able to resist the temptation of intervening from time to time on behalf of one or the other contending parties. For example, in the fifth book of the Iliad, we speed through the space between heaven and earth together with the steeds of Hera:

The horses winged their way unreluctant

through the space between the earth and the starry heaven.

As far as into the hazing distance a man can see with his eyes, who sits in his eyrie gazing on the wine-blue water, as far as this is the stride of the gods' proud neighing horses.3

At the beginning of book 13, we adopt the point of view of Zeus, and observe along with him the lands of the Thracians, the Mysians, and other such peoples, while elsewhere, sitting with Poseidon high on the loftiest peak of the green-wooded island of Samothrace, we gaze at the battle and the clamor of arms before the walls of Troy.

For Goethe, the reason Homeric poetry can raise us above all earthly things, and allow us to observe them from the point of view of the gods, is because it represents the paradigm of true poetry. As Goethe puts it in Poetry and Truth:

True poetry can be recognized by the fact that, like a secular Gospel, through the inner cheerfulness and outward pleasure it procures us, it can free us from the mundane burdens which weigh upon us. Like a hot-air balloon, it lifts us up into higher regions, along with the ballast that clings to us, and lets us see, from a bird's-eye view, the mad labyrinths of the world spread out before us. 4

In the last sentence, Goethe has in mind not only the view from above of the Homeric gods, but also the wings which Daedalus fashioned, in order to free himself from the Labyrinth in which Minos had imprisoned him. We shall later see in more detail why it is that, in Goethe's view, poetry has such an astonishing power.

The int imntcly connected themes of the bird's-eye view and flight of the soul hll\'l' n Ionic, complex history. Before we go on to examine the moral and

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Themes

existential meaning attributed to them, first by ancient philosophy, and then by Goethe, it may be useful to attempt to classify the various forms in which they appear. Since our discussion will be concerned only with philosophical and literary texts, we can leave aside the question of the real or ostensible Shamanic origin of these themes. s