Abstract

The significance of Goethe's aphorisms, verse maxims, and late philosophical poetry, it is argued, does not lie, as others have maintained, in any conceptual originality on his part, but rather in his aesthetic transmutation of commonplace thought. In his Maximen und Reflexionen and Spruchdichtung Goethe employed a novel mode of discourse that is neither poetry nor discursive prose - a mode of discourse which, because of its peculiar status, helps pin-point the border, so much contested in current literary theory, between aesthetic and non-aesthetic writing. His achievement is analysed against the background of the theory and practice of wisdom literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, viewed from the wider perspective of the contemporary debate on epistemological issues.