STRIVING FOR THE UNREACHABLE WHOLENESS

Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lines of Descent: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Emergence of Identity (Boston, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2014) ("Striving is everywhere in the literature of romanticism; in the prologue to Faust, Goethe's God tells Mephistopheles: 'Es irrt der Mensh so lang er strebt.' 'Man errs so long as he strives', and so, as long as we are on earth, we human beings are erring and striving. [] The idea of life as a striving for the infinite, a search to transcend the inevitable resistance of the world, appealed to the spirit of romanticism that developed as the first great cultural reaction to the Enlightenment, a movement in which Fichte, the philosopher, and Goethe, the poet and savant, were central. So, too, did the yearning for wholeness, for the project of bringing the superficially conflicting elements of reality into a unity; a project whose completion is, of course, forever beyond our grasp. For romanticism, striving's aim was a pleasingly unreachable wholeness." Id. at 55-56.).