Goethian

On Heideggerean grounds, this might seem simply to still move "within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological, calculating representation." (39) What Klee adds however is equally decisive: "The pictorial symbol for this 'non-concept' is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point." (40) Now if this sounds too formal or neo-Kantian--"morphological"--it also sounds very much like the Goethian concept of symbol (and nature) that had so attracted others, like Benjamin or Gadamer and doubtless even Heidegger himself.

Thus despite his best efforts to fulfill a monolithic national ideal, Lewis's unstable German appears by turns a militaristic Prussian officer devoted to a heartless honor cult, a hopeless Goethian suicide self-destructively obsessed with an unattainable woman, and a Freudian case study, tormented by an Oedipal nightmare that leads him compulsively to envy and despise men, to worship and abuse women.

He saw the learned adventurer as a composite figure, part Leonardo, part Goethian superman and part Christian heretic; his opera is therefore made of different and often contradictory elements, a mixture of ritual, puppet play and melodrama.