Biscuits and cake and the rod

"Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelahrten Schul--und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen."

"All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want, but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.31, Penguin classic).

There is an interesting language difference between the sturdy Old English monosyllable "rod" (from the Old Norse "rudda" meaning "club") and the Germanic "Birkenreiser" ... "birch twigs".

Giuseppe Mazzotta - in his Yale lectures on Dante - explains that Dante perceives the problem of living to be a problem of the will, rather than the more simplistic classical view that it is a problem of knowledge. It is not enough to know the definition of justice, say; one must have the will to be just. We often know what is good for us, but choose something other. And that is perhaps the idea of sin: sin as error, a missing of the mark, a falling short, a failure of the will.