Goethe’s conception of aesthetic judgement and his principle of the ‘uncriticizability’ of great works provided Benjamin with a way of thinking the necessary modification to the Early German Romantic Idea of art. His explication of the implicit metaphysical structure of Goethe’s corresponding Ideal of art reveals the contrasting features of his structure of the Absolute: as a sphere of pure content, a medium of destructive refraction, and a plurality of discontinuous archetypes (Charles 2020, 53–67). Because finite, particular works can never be romanticized into the unity of an individual Absolute, they remains immanently incomplete and yet nonetheless incapable of higher consummation: a “torso”, dismembered in relation to the whole, corpse-like in its deadness. In this context, the true task of criticism becomes not the consummation of the living work, but that destructive completion of the dying one.