March of the Muses: Goethe Again!

Credit: Original work: File:Goethe (Stieler 1828).jpg/Textzugabe von PantheraLeo1359531, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

We have almost made it through March! The new season — Spring in the Northern Hemisphere; Fall in the Southern — is firmly established even if we have dips back into the previous one.

Do you still feel a sense of stagnation? Can’t quite motivate yourself to move into the next stage of the cycle? For advice on what to do, let’s return to the indomitable Goethe.

Here’s the quote, which I found on Goodreads, but you can find online in various places:

“To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking.”

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

What’s a key takeaway from this quote? Perhaps it would be that we have a tendency to talk and to plan, but we often don’t actually take steps to act in the world. We like being armchair philosophers. And even less frequently are our actions motivated by what we think / believe. Why don’t we “walk the talk” according to this quote? Because it is hard.

But wait! Is that what Goethe would really say? Dear reader, the answer is no.

Consider the German original:

Handeln ist leicht, Denken schwer, nach dem Gedanken handeln unbequem.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre VII, 9

My translation is: Doing is easy; thinking hard; acting on your thoughts is uncomfortable.

The noun Handeln is interesting because it can also mean action, behavior and even trading or haggling. Handeln can also be a verb. To do this quote justice, we’d need more space than a blog post, but in short I feel it connects to what the Prosperos teaches about mechanical behavior. It is easy to just duplicate the patterns we have learned or inherited! But it is not the only option.

Thinking syllogistically as we learn in Translation® can be a challenge at first because we are used to thinking as mechanically as we act. Simply repeating and recombining conceptions and ideas that, again we have learned or inherited.

That last bit of the aphorism is curious, though. Is it uncomfortable to break out of mechanical behavior and behave according to clarified (rather than mechanical) thought? Or is it uncomfortable to mechanically put into action your mechanical thoughts?

I leave you with this question, dear reader!

Thank you for following the March of the Muses. For reading inspiration you may want to check out the High Watch Reading List. Goethe made the list!!