Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. This is the inscription on the grave of the aforementioned Kurt Tucholsky. On a grave what might be taken as a lyrical bit of philosophical reflection is made forcefully physical: the transitory is a decomposed body, like yours. You are transitory. Of what are you a symbol?
I take this to be Platonic: there are impermanent ideals, forms, essences, and of these the “transitory” manifestations we see are simply representations. In more contemporary terms: there are enduring conceptual classes and iterative cases: class humanae, case you. In less abstract terms: nothing that lasts a few decades is anything more than an example.
We regard time -our own and that of our civilization- as linear, successive, and indeed ascending, at least in our youth. Each generation, we feel, improves on the last not merely technologically but culturally and morally (that as we age we lose this sense is important); we are perfecting something. But time isn’t really linear, and -excluding cosmological or religious eschatology- we aren’t part of a narrative headed anywhere. We come into existence not as part of a plot but as fleeting instantiations of something apart from time: but what?
One author claimed that the word that is translated above as symbol, the German word Gleichnis, should really be rendered as parable. Are all of us and our works, the histories we trail and the cities we etch into the Earth, a parable? A parable is built of the mythic or fictive to illustrate the moral and real. What does the fiction of our lives illustrate? Is this what Kundera meant in asserting that the novel is civiliation’s “highest morality,” that in creating a fictional world our parable gains another illustrative perspective?
There is some question as to the value of permanence, too: is it better to be a symbol or an ideal? But this choice isn’t given to us, however we try to combat our transience with deeds and descendants.
