German Lebensweisheit ethic treats individual growth as interiorized Providence immanent in experience

Evidence

At this point, however, psychological description seems to pass over insensibly into moral judgment, into a vision of the reconciliation of past and present which is somehow an ethical one. But for the Western reader the whole ethical dimension of Benjamin’s work is likely to be perplexing, incorporating as it does a kind of ethical psychology which, codified by Goethe, has become traditional in Germany and deeply rooted in the German language, but for which we have no equivalent, except in such cultural transplants as the works of Erik Erikson. This Lebensweisheit is indeed a kind of halfway house between the classical idea of a fixed human nature, with its psychology of the humors, passions, sins, or character types; and the modern idea of pure historicity, of the determining influence of the situation or environment. As a compromise in the domain of the individual personality, it is not unlike the compromise of Hegel in the realm of history itself. Where for the latter a general meaning was immanent within the particular moment of history, for Goethe, in some sense, the overall goal of the personality and of its development is built into the particular emotion in question, or latent in the particular stage in the individual’s growth. For the system is based on a vision of the full development of the personality (a writer like Gide, deeply influenced by Goethe, gives but a pale and narcissistic reflection of this ethic, which expressed middle-class individualism at the moment of its historic triumph); it neither aims to break the personality upon some purely external standard of discipline, as is the case with Christianity, nor to abandon it to the meaningless accidents of empirical psychology, as is the case with most modern ethics, but rather sees the individual psychological experience as something which includes within itself seeds of its own development, something in which ethical growth is inherent as a kind of interiorized Providence. So, for example, Goethe’s Orphic Words, or the closing lines of Wilhelm Meister: “You make me think of Saul, the son of Kish, who went forth to seek his father’s asses and found, instead, a kingdom!” — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 145

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Lebensweisheit as an ethical psychology halfway between fixed human nature and pure historicity.
• XREF: The Goethe/Hegel parallel directly serves the reader’s Frankfurt-School lineage tracing—mediation between individual and historical totality. — connects to: Post-structuralist philosophy rejected lived experience and active human subjects — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 88; Individual subjectivity emerges through the soul’s progressive self-differentiation from universal nature — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 318; Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1025
• QUESTION: The correspondence of Lebensweisheit to middle-class individualism at its ‘historic triumph’ is worth chasing—Jameson only gestures at its ideological limits.

Broader Connections

• Post-structuralist philosophy rejected lived experience and active human subjects #contradicts (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 88
• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #corroborates (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025
• Individual subjectivity emerges through the soul’s progressive self-differentiation from universal nature #expands (0.70) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 318