Goethe and meridian thought

Abstract

This essay aims to analyze, in Goethe's Italian Journey, the metaphorical constellation Camus calls "meridian thought." While this term undoubtedly belongs to Camus, its genealogy—as we attempt to demonstrate—is undoubtedly more complex. A first antecedent is Nietzsche, and above all, his insistent reflection, in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, on the symbolic universe of "noon," understood as the dividing line between worn-out old-fashioned humanism and the herald of a new era for humanity. Valéry's "meridian" itinerary, summarized in the essay "Mediterranean Inspirations: A Journey Toward an Archetypal Place, the Origin of the Intellectual and Collective Consciousness of European Man," unfolds along a completely different path, completely independent of Nietzsche. But, like all archetypal places, it is marked by the conflict between a now irretrievable past and the denials of the present. This is precisely the antinomy already fully highlighted by Goethe in some stages of his Italian Journey. In Venice, as in Rome and Palermo, he recognizes that the traces of their brilliant past coexist, daily, with the profound cracks produced by a historical time in which every "aura" has faded. For him too, therefore—before Nietzsche explicitly theorized it—there is no alternative to the interminable struggle between Apollo and Dionysus.