HEIDEGGER WROTE TO JASPERS ON AUGUST 12, 1949: “I admittedly still lack an adequate relationship to Goethe. That's a real shortcoming but only one of many.” Whatever he may have meant by “an adequate relationship,” even as a Gymnasium student Heidegger was very well read in German literature, “a bit too much, to the detriment of other disciplines,” according to one of his teachers. Every bright and studious young German of Heidegger's generation knew Goethe's main works, and many lines from his poetry or from Faust were proverbial, in any case. It is an understatement when Walter Kaufmann says, “Nineteenth-century German philosophy consisted to a considerable extent in a series of efforts to assimilate the phenomenon of Goethe.” It seems likely that Heidegger, like Husserl or Jaspers, not to mention Gadamer, was one of “Goethe's children” and that Goethe's impact on his thought and language would have been deep and lasting.

Anyone reading Heidegger's Sein und Zeit with Goethe in mind would take note of the author's reference to Konrad Burdach's essay “Faust und die Sorge,” the first article in the first issue of the new journal Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgechichte, which appeared in 1923. Heidegger extracts from Burdach's essay a fable from Hyginus (#220) about “cura”—care or Sorge—which reads as follows: