Goethe’s Hope
How does Goethe respond to Kant’s question, “What may I hope?” Simon Friedland explores the poet’s unique approach to hope through literature and myth in this First Friday Lecture.
About the Event
Presented by Basic Program instructors and open to all, these lectures also complement the texts and ideas from our curriculum and always include a Q&A session.
This First Friday Lecture is supported by the Anastaplo Lecture Series Fund in memory of Basic Program Instructor George Anastaplo.
“What may I hope?” Immanuel Kant famously considered this question, alongside “What can I know?” and “What should I do?”, to be one of the three fundamental questions of philosophy. In this First Friday Lecture, Simon Friedland will consider how Germany’s greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), reformulated and responded to the Kantian question of hope in his literary work. He will argue that Goethe searches for an alternative to the Christian notion of hope, turning to the myths of Greek antiquity to articulate an anthropological notion of hope as an irreducible dimension of the human being’s orientation in the world.
Who's Speaking
Simon Friedland
Simon Friedland joined the Basic Program instructional staff in 2023. He received his Ph.D. in 2021 from the University of Chicago in German Studies, with a dissertation entitled, “The Pulse of Prosody: Versification and Antiquity in the Age of Weimar Classicism.” From 2021-23, Simon was a Humanities Teaching Fellow at UChicago. Simon is a graduate of Reed College. While a student, Simon spent one year in Berlin at the Freie Universität.
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