Ethik (Ethics)

Michael Lipkin
Hamilton College

Does Goethe’s work contain an ethical system? Goethe’s life coincided with the flowering and end of ethics as a philosophical discipline, and his two Wilhelm Meister novels—Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants)—constitute a reflection in the position of the individual in the Age of Ethics. In the Lehrjahre, Goethe narrates the travails of the individual in a world no longer secured by the moral cosmology of Christianity, while, in the Wanderjahre, he paints a picture of a fragmented world, dominated by the single value of utility, in which the individual seems scarcely to play any role at all. Each novel contains a sustained engagement with a philosophical ethics—the former, that of Kant and his notion of the Ideal; the latter, that of Spinoza and the relationship between the part and whole—that it seeks not to represent, but rather to adapt as a narrative and hermeneutic practice. In this way, both Wilhelm Meister novels stand, together, as one single plea for an artistic ethics in a world at once administered and disintegrating.

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  1. Introduction
  2. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—Kant—The Ideal
  3. Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years—Spinoza—The Part and the Whole
  4. Conclusion
  5. Notes
  6. Works Cited and Further Reading

Introduction

Does the work of Goethe represent a coherent ethical system? Is there such a thing as a Goethean ethics, as there is an Aristotelean or Kantian one? This question seems to be a rather parochial one, at least from the perspective of the largely scientific-epistemological and philological concerns of contemporary Goethe scholarship. In Goethe’s time, too, it would have had a philistinish air about it, redolent of the moral demands he complained of his bourgeois readership placing on him. And yet, Goethe’s work abounds with the terminology of ethics and moral thinking. In virtually all of his work, one stumbles across terms such as Glück (happiness), Tugend (virtue), Moral (morality), das Sittliche (the ethical), and das Ziemende (what is proper, fitting), all of which seem to suggest that, even if his work advances no explicit system, the characters that populate it, the narrators that convey it, and perhaps even the author that conceived it may all live in a world where a right life does exist and does, in its rightness, hold sway.

The problem, at least for the ethically-minded scholar, is that Goethe deploys these terms without ever defining them explicitly or fixing their equivalence as synonyms or antonyms. In Dare To Be Happy! A Study of Goethe’s Ethics (1993), which takes its title from the motto of the Tower Society in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship)—an entity whose ultimate moral status in that work is, to say the least, far from clear—Julie D. Prandi argues that Goethe rejects the distinction between ‘virtue’ and ‘happiness’ that constituted the whole basis of Kant’s moral philosophy.1 But how should one construe the relationship between, say, ‘virtue’ and ‘the good,’ which, to muddy the matter further, Goethe’s characters and narrators sometimes refer to as ‘the beautiful and the good,’ a formulation Kant would hardly have disapproved of? And how can one even begin to sift through a body of work so heterogeneous, not only in the variety of positions it takes, but also in the multiplicity of levels of representation it encompasses and types of truth claims it advances? One character’s pronouncement might be contradicted by another’s, only to have both contradicted by a narrator or a later work or a remark attributed to the author himself, all colored in their turn by the demands of a given artistic situation, half-negated by dramatic and tonal irony. The matter is hardly clarified by the many volumes, letters, diaries, and recorded conversations that constitute a kind of shadow corpus alongside Goethe’s canonical literary output. These, too, are all tinged by the spirit of performance with which Goethe engaged the many interlocutors who entered his life, not least of all himself.

Still, it is the biographical, more specifically, the dates of Goethe’s biography, that hold the most promising clue to his long engagement with the ethical. Simply put, Goethe’s life was co-extensive with the entire lifespan of modern moral thought. The Age of Goethe was the Age of Ethics. To offer just a superficial survey: The decades from Goethe’s birth in 1749 to the publication of the first books of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in 1795 saw, in Scotland, the development of the Smithian and Humean doctrines of moral sentiment, as well as the Hutchesonian system of moral intuition; in France, Voltaire’s hedonistic ethics of liberty, Rousseau’s plea for the moral primacy of conscience, and the Marquis de Sade’s savage anti-morality; in Germany, Kant’s deontological refutation of all of these. Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans remained staples of private educations like Goethe’s, and by the end of the century they would be available for the first time in German translation. Spinoza completed his journey from atheist beyond the pale of public consideration to metaphysician and ethicist of the highest rank. Thinking back on the teachers of his youth in an autobiographical fragment in 1810, Goethe recalled the spirit of moral variety that characterized the Enlightenment at its height: “Der Eine setzte die Hauptmaxime des Lebens in die Gutmütigkeit und Zartheit, der andre in eine gewisse Gewandtheit, der dritte in Gleichgültigkeit und Leichtsinn, der vierte in Frömmigkeit, der fünfte in Fleiß und pflichtmäßige Tätigkeit, der folgende in eine imperturbable Heiterkeit und immer so fort, sodaß ich vor meinem zwanzigsten Jahre fast die Schulen sämtlicher Moral-Philosophen durchlaufen hatte” (FA 14:937; “The one set good nature and tenderness as the main maxim in life; for another, it was a kind of skillfulness, for a third, equanimity and levity; for a fourth, piety; for a fifth, dutiful diligence; for the next, imperturbable cheerfulness, and so on and son, so that before I had turned twenty, I had nearly run through all the schools of all moral philosophers).2 By the same token, the decades leading up to Goethe’s death in 1832 witnessed, in one form or another, the death of ethical thought as the Enlightenment knew it: in Bentham’s utilitarianism; in Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Spirit) and Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1820; Philosophy of Right); in the French utopianism that would eventually give birth to Marx. All these shifted the question of the good away from the reflective capacities of the individual and placed it once and for all onto the collective, as a problem of social structure and organization.

If, as I propose to do in the following, one approaches Goethe’s work not as an artistic vehicle for a private moral system but as a meditation on the Age of Ethics itself, the works that offer the most promising path into the ethical Goethe are Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and its sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden (1821/29; Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years, or the Renunciants). The first, which Goethe developed from the Theatralische Sendung (Theatrical Mission) fragment he worked on from 1777 to 1785, tells the story of the hapless titular protagonist, the son of a bourgeois family, who sets out to pursue a theatrical career in a world structured neither by the moral certainties of Christianity nor by the stable social coordinates of the English picaresque à la Henry Fielding. The ultimate shape and purpose of an individual life are no longer given; they must now be created. In the Wanderjahre, which Goethe similarly worked and re-worked in the last decades of his life, Wilhelm, now a member of the Illuminati-like Tower Society and obliged by their rules to travel from place to place, never staying longer than three days, vanishes from vast portions of the highly fragmented text. He traverses a landscape dotted with various societies each engaged in their own educational projects, all ruled by the dominant value of the age, utility.

Taken together, I will argue, the novels constitute one continuous reflection on the position of the individual during the Age of Ethics, and, no less significantly, on the position of literature vis-à-vis the ethical. For Wilhelm is not a character, as he was in the Theatralische Sendung, where he possesses a unique literary talent that he sought to resolve with the limitations of the social world of his time. He is, rather, an interpreter and an interpretive function. Every character he encounters seems to have been assigned some purpose within the greater purpose of his life and the novel that depicts it; insofar as Wilhelm and the reader must discover this purpose together, Wilhelm Meister is able to bridge the cleft between the artistic representation of various ways of being and ethical thought itself. This function is made still more apparent in the Journeyman Years, where Wilhelm is the locus point of a great number of textual fragments and narrative experiments, a clearing in the thicket of the age from which Wilhelm and the reader must posit a new whole to replace the whole that has been lost. Interpretation is therefore a kind of Selbstbildung, a formation of the self, the originary faculty from which writing, reading, and ethical thought all depend.

Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship—Kant—The Ideal

In the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788; Critique of Practical Reason), Immanuel Kant took stock of the history of moral thought and meditated on the distinction, central to all ethical thought since Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, between two kinds of goodness: das Gute, as the virtuous, and das Wohl, as the happy, which is merely pleasurable. According to Kant, the ultimate goal of moral life, the Supreme Good, is not the mere coincidence of happiness and virtue, but rather their causal co-existence: a life that is happy because it is virtuous. The problem of this summum bonum is that, because we have incomplete control over the conditions of our happiness, we necessarily mislead ourselves into taking up virtue as a path to happiness, or taking it up only insofar as it is not in conflict with happiness. This misapprehension then blurs and bends the morality of the maxims we set for ourselves. For this reason, the Supreme Good must be relegated to the realm of the noumenal, of Ideas, along with God, the immortal soul, and the freedom of the will, all of which philosophy claimed illegitimately to be able to know, and banished from the world of appearances, where life as we are condemned to live it unfolds. This does not mean, however, that we can dispense with the Supreme Good. It remains for us a regulative ideal, a thought that, though it can never be attained, nonetheless shapes and guides and urges on our actions. Five years later, in the Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790; Critique of the Power of Judgment), Kant went on to show that the objective reality of this higher purpose can never be known. But because a life that dispenses with it entirely would be agonizing to live, far beneath our dignity as rational subjects, this highest of ends must nonetheless be posited, even if it ultimately remains a shaky structure, built over an abyss.

Like Kant’s second critique, the Wilhelm Meister novels, too, are a stock-taking of the ethical subject at the end of the eighteenth century. Wilhelm’s “inner need” will also guide him toward a higher purpose, always receding beyond the horizon, out of the bourgeois world, into and out of a life in the theater, and finally toward fatherhood, marriage, and membership in a community of reasoning individuals devoted to the betterment of the world. From the very first book of the Lehrjahre, Goethe makes clear that this “inner need”—Wilhelm describes it as the desire to appear with his lover, actress Marianne, “als ein Paar gute Geister den Menschen, ihre Herzen aufzuschließen, ihre Gemüter zu berühren und ihnen himmlische Genüsse zu bereiten” (HA 7:66; as a pair of good spirits, unlocking the hearts [of men], touching their feelings, and offering them heavenly delights)—the pursuit of this ethos will necessarily require transgressing the boundaries of conventional morality.3 Unlike Werther’s unfulfilled love for Charlotte, Wilhelm’s liaison with Marianne is very much a consummated one, in which he “brachte Nächte im Genusse vertraulicher Liebe, seine Tage in Erwartung neuer seliger Stunden zu” (HA 7:33; spent nights in the intimate pleasures of love and days in anticipation of further hours of bliss). The novel’s events are set in motion when Wilhelm’s family sends him on a trip to attend to a business matter, where by chance he encounters a young woman from “a good house” who has run off with an actor from a theater troupe, and now finds herself facing a tribunal, a living instantiation of the very morality Wilhelm and the narrator perceive him as rightly transgressing: “Wilhelm faßte, als er ihr Geständnis hörte, einen hohen Begriff von den Gesinnungen des Mädchens, indes sie die Gerichtspersonen für eine freche Dirne erkannten und die gegenwärtigen Bürger Gott dankten, daß dergleichen Fälle in ihren Familien entweder nicht vorgekommen oder nicht bekannt gowerden waren” (HA 7:51; Having heard her confession, Wilhelm formed a high opinion of the girl’s character, while the officers treated her as a wanton strumpet, and the good representatives of the bourgeoisie were thankful that nothing like this had happened in their families, or at least was not public knowledge). The life of the ethical subject will not, then, consist simply in following the codex of behaviors that the world itself defines as virtuous. As the novel emphasizes in an early conversation between Wilhelm and his cousin Werner, who urges him to take up a career in business and delivers a paean to the beauty of well-run port cities and double-entry book-keeping, ethical life must often stand in direct opposition to the way of the world.

But, as the novel also makes clear in its treatment of the life of the itinerant artist, the rejection of social convention is not in itself a sufficient condition for a truly ethical life either. This is made apparent in the figure of Serlo, introduced in the fourth book of the Lehrjahre as the director of a theater company who takes on the little troupe that Wilhelm is able to rally around himself. Narratively, Serlo embodies the theatrical success that Wilhelm believes he longs for. He is at the same time a pointed countermodel to Wilhelm’s tireless striving. “Auf dem Theater geboren und gesäugt” (born and nursed in the theater), the narrator tells us, Serlo’s entire existence has been tuned to elicit vigorous applause, “ehe er wußte, was das Handelsklätschen bedeute” (HA 7:268; even before he had any idea what all the clapping was about). Serlo’s theatrical success, which he attains early on, serves no inner need. He lacks Wilhelm’s naiveté about the way of the world. And, most significantly, unlike Wilhelm, who can only play himself, the part of the sick prince, Serlo’s possesses a mimetic gift trained into his body by regular beatings from his father: “Schon als Knabe ahmte er Personen nach, so daß man sie zu sehen glaubte, ob ihm schon an Gestalt, Alter, und Wesen völlig unähnlich und untereinander verschieden waren” (HA 7:269; While still a boy, he could imitate persons so well that people believed they were seeing these very persons, despite the fact that they were quite different from the boy in figure, age, and character, and different from each other). What the life in the theater requires is incompatible with the self-directed life Wilhelm must learn to aspire to. Slavish mimicry of an example already given is no path to a higher ideal. This would be nothing more than “good behavior,” what in the case of Serlo is nothing more than Dressur, the training of a performing animal. Following a self-posited ethical ideal will require making error after error rather than simply doing what is right and not doing what is wrong, like a circus animal that climbs onto a ball from fear of the trainer’s whip.

What, then, is this ideal, and what would it mean to follow it? One half of the answer is given by the various strangers of Goethe’s novel, which plays on the popular taste for stories about Freemasonry, such as Friedrich Schiller’s Der Geisterseher (1787; The Ghostseer) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Emanuel Schikaneder’s Die Zauberflöte (1791; The Magic Flute). These figures show up early on in Wilhelm’s journey to give him counsel as he sets out into the world. The first stranger, who identifies himself to Wilhelm but not to the reader, chides him for his narcissistic belief that, because of his childhood fascination with his puppet theater, “Fate” or some other higher power has destined him for a life onstage. “Leider höre ich schon wieder das Wort Schicksal von einem jungen Mann aussprechen,” the stranger says, in stern Kantian tones, “der sich eben in einem Alter befindet, wo man gewöhnlich seinen lebhaften Neigungen den Willen höherer Wesen unterszuschieben pflegt” (HA 7:71; I am sorry to hear the word ‘fate’ spoken once again by a young man at a time when passionate inclinations are all too often interpreted as the workings of a higher power). Wilhelm asks the man if he believes in fate; the man replies that it’s not a matter of belief, but rather of interpretation, of “welche Vorstellungsart zu unserm Besten gereicht” (HA 7:71; which way of looking at things is most advantageous to us). “Das Gewebe dieser Welt,” he continues, “ist aus Notwendigkeit und Zufall gebidlet; die Vernunft des Menschen stellt sich zwischen beide und weiß sie zu beherrschen; sie behandelt das Notwendige als den Grund ihres Daseins; das Zufällige weiß sie zu lenken, zu leiten, und zu nutzen” (HA 7:71; The texture of this world is made up of necessity and chance. However, reason holds the balance between them, taking necessity as the base of its existence, but manipulating and directing chance, and using it).

In the following book, another stranger, later revealed to be a colleague of the first, tells Wilhelm that one’s own reason, and not the swerves and accidents of fate, make “ein[en] menschlichen Meister” (HA 7:121; a human master). The path of the ethical subject toward an ideal consists of recognizing oneself as the arbiter and the interpreter, if not the pilot, of one’s own existence. This power both permits and demands that one seize what one can from what chance and error furnish and apply one’s reason and imagination to the task of giving one’s own life a shape, a form, a coherence, an end. For Wilhelm, this will mean giving up his childish fantasy of the theater and accepting his place in the Tower Society as a community of rational individuals who take responsibility for the good of the world itself—at least, as best they can in era of revolution and continent-wide warfare. It also means accepting his paternity of Felix, the child of his love affair with Marianne, as well as of Mignon, the near-feral performing child he encounters in the troupe, and the responsibilities of a marriage to Natalie, which permits him to regain, at last, now through his own searching, and by his own means, the art collection that used to be in his home and that set him on his journey. Judgment, the ability to distinguish between the necessary and the contingent in one’s own existence, and imagination, the ability to imagine some end that both might serve—these are the sole true virtues in Wilhelm Meister’s ethics. These lead Wilhelm out of himself, away from his inclinations and passions, and toward the world, into the web of relations and obligations that bind him to others, which are no longer arbitrary rules imposed by others, like the tribunal that sat over Madame Melina, but appear now suffused with the meaning and purpose he is able to give his own life. Such is the responsibility of the modern ethical subject, for whom there is no place in a world whose legitimizing and organizing structures have collapsed. He must constitute his own world, with his own sense, and make his own place in it.

If the ability to self-posit and self-interpret is Wilhelm’s virtue, then what of the other half of the summum bonum, happiness? Can such an existence be a happy one? This is the question that will have to be answered by Wilhelm’s marriage to Natalie, the “Amazon” whom he meets for the first time when she comes to his rescue when he and the troupe are attacked by marauders after their first theatrical success. The paradoxicality of Natalie’s “hermaphroditism,” the way that in Wilhelm’s mind she combines both male and female characteristics into a single image of earthly perfection, signals to the reader her essentially fictional nature. For Wilhelm, as for the Beautiful Soul, her aunt, who is similarly stirred by her acquaintance, she is an ideal to be followed and not imitated. In the Beautiful Soul’s description of her, offered not in amazement but “Verehrung” (reverence), “man sah nicht leicht eine edlere Gestalt, ein ruhiger Gemüt und eine immer gleiche, auf keinen Gegenstand eingeschränkte Tätigkeit. Sie war keinen Augenblick ihres Lebens unbeschäftigt, und jedes Geeschäft ward unter ihren Händen zur würidgen Handlung. Alles schien ihr gleich, wenn sie nur das verrichten konnte, was in der Zeit und am Platz war, und ebenso könnte sie ruhig, ohne Ungeduld, bleiben, wenn sich nichts zu tun fand” (HA 7:417; One could not imagine a more noble presence, a more peaceful disposition, a greater evenness of attention to every kind of goal or object. Never for a moment was she idle, and everything she turned her hands to became a worthy object. Nothing troubled her so long as she could do what was demanded of her by circumstances, and she could be quite content when she did not find anything that needed doing at the moment). Natalie is the spirit of happiness in purposiveness itself, directed outward toward the real, existing world—in her care for the poor, which consists not in giving alms but in fulfilling “das nächste Bedürfnis” (a practical need) and in her capacity as an educator, who teaches her charges “gewisse Gesetzen auszussprechen” (HA 7:527; to pronounce certain laws). She has never loved, and seems to have no need of love, except, Wilhelm observes, uncharacteristically hitting the nail on the head, out of the spirit of charity, if another should need it. Natalie represents the summum bonum itself. Wilhelm’s happiness will hinge not on being like Natalie, but on being with her, as her husband, and having her presence alongside him fill out the virtue of his striving with the earthbound happiness between man and wife that rounds off the Shakespearean comedies on which the last chapters of the novel, full of unlikely revelations and frenzied proposals, so openly draw.

In his lectures on aesthetics, Hegel refers obliquely to Wilhelm Meister as a contemporary romance in which the modern knight-errant fights for his private dreams of happiness against a social order inimical to them—and loses. What Wilhelm’s apprenticeship teaches him is the necessity of subsuming the pleasure principle under the reality principle. This reading does not quite track with the novel’s hectic end. Instead, what the many reversals of fortune at the novel’s end underline is the necessary blurring of the fictional and the real that constitute the ethical life, as the life lived toward an ideal posited by the self to the self. Because Wilhelm mistakenly proposed to Therese, the betrothed of Lothario whom he mistakenly believes is his Amazon, he reconciles himself to the fact that, having known her, she will remain with him always. Then, through a lucky fall of chance, or perhaps a twist of fate—the timely discovery of a document that allows Therese and Lothario to marry after all—Wilhelm and Natalie are able to marry. Felix, through a similar twist, narrowly escapes drinking a glass of poisoned milk. It is Wilhelm’s own striving, his seizing of the narrative of his own life, that brings the two into his life. But it is through an act of earthly grace that he is able to keep them. It is through the work of literature itself, with one foot in the imagined world and one in the real, through an act of artistic imagination that must nonetheless be adequate to life’s realities and contingencies, that the fictional is able to extrude into the real world, and happiness bursts through into the virtuous life.

One last question remains: Why is it, in this colorful and varied world, that it is only Wilhelm who can undertake an ‘apprenticeship’ at all? Why is it that all of the secondary characters are ‘flat,’ and it is only Wilhelm who is round? And what can this distinction tell us about the ethical subject at the end of the eighteenth century? An answer may be found in, of all places, Friedrich Kittler’s joyfully anti-humanist “discourse-analytic” interpretation of the novel, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel (1978; Poetry as Socialization Game).4 Kittler’s reconstruction of Wilhelm’s “socialization” focuses on Goethe’s revision of the account of Wilhelm’s fateful first encounter with the puppet theater in the ten years between the Theatralische Sendung and the Lehrjahre. Where in the original fragment the puppet theater is given to Wilhelm by his paternal grandmother as a kind of recompense for his mother’s faithlessness and lack of affection, in the Lehrjahre Wilhelm’s mother is the decisive gift-giving figure, which Kittler interprets as the sign of a new “innovation”: “Die Sozialisation um ihrer selbst Willen erhält auch einen Namen: ‘Mutterlichkeit,’ und einen Agenten: die Mutter” (Socialization for its own sake contains a name: ‘motherliness,’ and an agent: the mother).5 The very capacity to articulate a wish, a desire, an “inner need,” that can then articulate an ideal for itself, arises from the exchange of gift (affection) and counter-gift (desire) that structures the relationship between mother and child that emerged during the Enlightenment, when “die Kinderfreuden eigentlich zu erfinden und anzuwenden ist nicht des Vaters, sondern der Mutter Sache ist” (discovering and exercising the joys of children is [no longer] a father’s business, but rather a mother’s).6 Childhood, Kittler argues, emerges out of a new “medicinal topography” of motherliness that crystallized around this time. “Durch die Zentrierung der Familie auf die Kinder gerät die Mutter grundsätzlich unter ein Gesetz das ihr den Kindern gegenüber paradoxerweise stets mehr als nur Gesetzerfüllung vorschreibt” (The centering of the family around children places the mother fundamentally under a law that demands that she comport herself toward the child in a way that, paradoxically, must be more than the mere fulfillment of the law).7 The counterpoint to this structure of desire can be found in the figure of Serlo, who grows up under his father’s harsh tutelage, and in the liminal figure of Mignon, who does not survive the process of “subjectification” and “Oedipalization” she must undergo at the novel’s end. Goethe’s novel is, then, at once a product and a stock-taking of this new social formation, this new desiring-assemblage, without which the idealism and fictionality that powers ethical thought could not function—an origin myth of the modern ethical subject.

Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years—Spinoza—The Part and the Whole

In Dichtung und Wahrheit, Goethe singled out Spinoza’s Ethics as the decisive book of his young adulthood, the sole volume that had been able to bring order and discipline to his peculiar nature. He had read the Ethics with Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819) in the 1780s, and as Eckart Förster has noted, the two men took diametrically opposing lessons from the book.8 For Jacobi, Spinoza’s system, “with its exclusion of a personal God of Creation, its denial of human freedom and final causes, and its identification of the divine with nature as a realm of necessary law,” was the only plausible universal explanation and intellectual foundation.9 Its bleakness was proof that the very desire for such an explanation had to be resisted at all costs. Goethe, on the other hand, read the book backwards, skipping the beginning and meditating instead on final book. There, Spinoza elucidates the “third kind of knowledge and the blissful effect it has on the human mind.”10 For Goethe, the spirit of Spinozism lay in its conception of knowledge as a kind of intuition that grasps the essences of things by understanding them as parts in a whole. To take Spinoza’s example, the most correct way to define a circle is as a plane figure described by a line of which one end is fixed and the other movable, since every other property of a circle, like the fixed ratio of its radius to its circumference, can be derived from it. Goethe’s attempts to carry this theory over to the natural world, however, quickly ran into the difficult that, unlike in mathematics, parts in nature do not have an existence independent of a whole. A leaf, for example, cannot exist except as part of a plant. Accordingly, Goethe developed a Spinozism in reverse. Instead of moving directly from an efficient cause to its properties, he imagined an “intuitive understanding” that moved from the totality to the efficient cause. Since no whole in the natural world, or, for that matter, the social world, can be given in immediate experience, this knowledge would now be a two-step process: first, an imaginative positing of the whole; then an examination of the parts to see whether the whole had caused them.

This problem is at the core of Goethe’s sequel to Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, titled Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, which he began drafting soon after he had revisited his youthful Spinozism in the third book of Dichtung und Wahrheit. Where the world of the Lehrjahre took its coherence from the parallel unfolding of Wilhelm’s own life and the novel itself, no such coherence exists in the world or the text of the Wanderjahre. Right away, the reader learns that the Tower Society has dislodged Wilhelm from the stability of married life by sending him on a journey. Wherever he goes, he can give no information about himself, and he can stay no longer than three days in any one location. The novel is highly episodic, describing the various individuals, families, and societies Wilhelm encounters. It is fragmented still further by inset novellas and collections of aphorisms. Some of these are woven diagetically into the text, while others are inserted by the narrator as a kind of intermission to the already sparse action.

The novel’s approach to ethical thought has undergone a parallel transformation. Where the world of the first Wilhelm Meister was a compendium of ways of being, in the Wanderjahre only one value dominates—utility. Among the various societies Wilhelm visits, like the estate run by Hersilie and Lenardo’s uncle, or the Pedagogic Province, the notion of the Supreme Good has given way to the problems of collective education and administration. In the absence of a cohesive social whole for the individual to move through and make sense of—a structure already tottering in the first novel—how can a collective existence be best organized for maximal happiness and usefulness? Individual folly and error have similarly been replaced by “the social problem” of inequality, which for a century to come Goethe’s critics on the left would charge him with ignoring. The wealthy live in lush valleys, while the mountains are populated by a Lumpenproletariat of textile workers, woodsmen, miners, smugglers, poachers, and treasure hunters, all picking their way through an infernal landscape seared red and pitched black with coal fire and factory smoke. And, most significantly, where the ethics of the Lehrjahre turned on the possibility of the ideal, the core principle of the Wanderjahre is its ostensible opposite—renunciation (Entsagung).

Much has been made of the central role renunciation began to take in Goethe’s work around the 1790s. Georg Lukács argued that Goethe’s emphasis on renunciation resulted from his shaking off the youthful misconception that the strictures of society could be burst in any lasting way, hence Goethe’s increasing use of female protagonists. Julie Prandi, on the other hand, reads renunciation as continuous with the Stoic and Epicurean ideal of happiness in the moment that runs through Goethe’s work.11 Renunciation is a kind of rear-guard action whereby the individual is able to preserve some form of a happiness he is bound to give up by choosing to give it up himself.

However, in the Wanderjahre renunciation is explicitly tied to the Spinozist problem of the relation between the part and the whole: namely, the question of how, in the life of the individual, that which the whole demands be foregone might nevertheless be preserved. In his fragment on Goethe in Minima Moralia (1951), Theodor W. Adorno calls renunciation—“Verzicht auf ungeschmälerte Nähe, Leidenschaft und ungebrochenes Glück” (the relinquishment of total contact, passion, and unalloyed happiness)—a kind of tact, “die rettende Auskunft zwischen entfremdeten Menschen” (the saving accommodation between alienated human beings).12 The historical moment demands the bourgeois individual rid himself of the “absolutist compulsion” still possible in the first Wilhelm Meister, in which Wilhelm, by sampling all that the world had to offer, sought and was able to fashion a kind of personal wholeness for himself. Now, in the last decades of Goethe’s life, “Das Humane bestand ihm [dem bürgerlichen Individuum] in einer Selbsteinschränkung, die beschwörend den unausweichlichen Gang der Geschichte zur eigenen Sache machte, die Inhumanität des Fortschritts, die Verkümmerung des Subjekts” (The human consisted [for the bourgeois individual] in a self-limitation which affirmatively espoused as its own the ineluctable course of history, the inhumanity of progress, the withering of the subject).13 One form that this self-limitation takes is a kind of “zeremoniale Konvention” (ceremonial convention) whereby one pretends that ideas and forms of life history has drained of their objective meaning can still nonetheless possess a subjective one.

The Wanderjahre abounds with attempts to preserve through subjective self-limitation, customs, identities, and activities that have been made irrelevant by the disintegration of social wholes. Wilhelm’s forced absence from Natalie opens the negative possibility that familial life might still anchor and organize Wilhelm’s ethical life, even though the very existence of a sequel to his story suggests that it has not and cannot. The transparent arbitrariness of the strictures imposed on Wilhelm, which prevent him from making connections or putting down roots in any one place, give his travels a negative purpose, in tacit admission of the fact that a positive one, whose meaning and substance would be as self-evident as his “inner need,” is no longer possible.

The same holds true for the various individuals Wilhelm meets and reads about in the novel’s first books. The “second St. Joseph” grows up in a secularized abbey once devoted to and still full of images of the saint; he continues to imitate St. Joseph and take him up as a model, even though the secular world has drained him of his exemplary force. Monsieur de Revanne, the protagonist of “Die pilgernde Törin” (The Mad Pilgrim), lives on an estate “das eines Fürstes würdig wäre” (HA 8/51; fit for a prince) though in the post-Revolutionary world aristocracy and monarchy have been sheared of their rank-conferring power. Hersilie and Lenardo’s uncle has returned from America, the traditionless land of boundless freedom, to form a community under his benevolent rule. This is the last gasp of the enlightened despotism in whose service Goethe had placed himself in Weimar, that had taught his friends Schiller and Hegel to think and write, and that was enjoying an Indian summer under Napoleon and the Continental System, soon to cleared away by industrialized democracy, at the same time as Goethe began writing his book.

Renunciation finds its most vocal mouthpiece, however, in Jarno, the gruff mentor from the previous novel who told Wilhelm bluntly that he had no talent and counseled him to read Shakespeare. In the sequel, he returns as an enthusiast of geology, his name changed to Montan. “Ja, es ist jetzo die Zeit der Einseitigkeiten” (HA 8:37; The day for specialization has come), he tells Wilhelm. “Wohl dem, der es befreift, für sich und andere in diesem Sinne wirkt” (HA 8:37) Fortunate is he who comprehends this and labors in this spirit for himself and others). He goes on: “Für den geringsten Kopf wird es immer ein Handwerk, für den besseren eine Kunst, und der beste, wenn er eins tut, tut er alles, oder, um weniger paradox zu sein, in dem einen, was er recht tut, sieht er das Gleichnis von allem, was recht getan wird” (HA 8:37; For the lesser mind, this will always be a craft, for the better one an art, and for the best, if he does one he does all, or to be less paradoxical, in the one thing he does properly he sees the likeness of all that is done properly).

If the conditions of ethical life have been transformed, then so too has the structure of desire therein. In lieu of an ideal powered by the erotic imagination, as in the Lehrjahre, ethical desire now consists of raising a subjective inclination to the level of an objective law—of making an object, any object, into the Object, the elusive thing that, when at last possessed, will confer ultimate meaning and with it final happiness. Ethos is now a supplement to desire, rather than desire sublimated, the additional element over and above desire itself that bonds with it to form the stable basis of an individual existence. On the one hand, this describes in a proto-Nietzschean key the life of the artist, like Goethe’s Tasso, who to the detriment of his real existence, devotes himself to problems and projects legible only to himself. On the other hand, throughout the novel Goethe depicts this kind of ethical self-identification as no less foolish than noble. Montan’s obsession with geology lets Fitz, a wandering boy from the mountains, easily deceive him by promising a piece of rare rock. Lucidor, the protagonist of the novella Hersilie gives to Wilhelm, is introduced as a master of the law, possessing all the knowledge and practical skills needed to effectively administer a state and his own life. But in a moment of passion, Lucidor is entirely unable to govern himself. He perpetually “bares his soul in the wrong place,” and is rescued from the destruction of his love affair with Lucinde only by betraying his principles, by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Gone, too, is the sense of adventure and free play that characterized Wilhelm’s brief artistic life—the freedom to imagine, to err, to sample all that life has to offer, right or wrong. In Hersilie’s house, a servant takes Wilhelm through their gallery and tells him that there is “kein Bild, das auch nur von ferne, auf Religion, Überlieferung, Mythologie, Legende oder Fabel hindeutete; unser Her will, daß die Einblidungskraqft nur gefördert werde, um sich das Wahre zu vergegenwärtigen” (HA 8:65; No picture in the entire manor that refers even obliquely to religion, tradition, mythology, legend, or fable. Our master wishes the imagination to be encouraged only in order that it may take cognizance of the true). In the Pedagogical Province, where Wilhelm ultimately deposits Felix, a Männerbund (men’s association) changes the final lines of the song Wilhelm sings to himself while walking from “Und dein Streben, sei’s in Liebe, / Und dein Leben sei die Tat” (May your striving be in love / and of your deeds your life be made) to “Du im Leben nichts verschiebe; / Sei dein Leben Tat um Tat” (HA 8:312–13; In your life postpone no duty / And may your life be deed on deed). In contrast to Wilhelm’s erotic education, both the imagination and the bodily existence of every apprentice is regimented for maximum philosophical utility. Novices must greet strangers by crossing their arms across their chests and looking up at the heavens. Those at an intermediate stage put their hands behind their backs and look smilingly at the earth. The most advanced students stand stiffly, with their arms at their sides. These customs are explained adequately enough as symbolizing man’s progress from religion to science and on to self-sufficiency. But the imaginative richness that marked Wilhelm’s first play with the puppet theater and all his subsequent adventures has been banished.

In this fragmented world, as in ours, art, imagination and scientific inquiry have all been recouped as functional, as techniques of education and administration. Montan pronounces the verdict of the age on Wilhelm’s ethical development. It is not a happy one: “Ich sehe dich an wie einen Wanderstab, der die wunderliche Eigenschaft hat, in jeder Ecke zu grünen, wo man ihn hinstellt, nirgends aber Wurzel zu fassen. Nun male dir das Gleichnis weiter aus und lerne begreifen, wenn weder Förster noch Gärtner, weder Köhler noch Tischer, noch irgendein Handwerker aus dir etwas zu machen weiß” (HA 8:40; I look at you as a wanderer’s staff, which has the remarkable quality of sprouting leaves in whatever corner one sets it, but of nowhere striking roots. Extend the parable for yourself and you will understand why neither forester nor gardener, neither charcoal burner nor cabinet maker nor craftsman can do anything with you.)

Montan and Wilhelm return to this point near the novel’s midpoint, at festival for the miners of the region. Montan reiterates that the important thing is to devote oneself to the one thing that truly matters. Uncertain, Wilhelm asks the ethical question: “Worauf kommt nun alles an”? (But what does truly matter?) “Denken und Tun,” replies Montan, “Tun und Denken” (HA 8:263; Thought and deed, deed and thought). Though, in keeping with the spirit of the times, Wilhelm does take up a useful career as a physician, the answer does not seem to satisfy him. Nor can the reader help but feel that it fits the spirit of everything Wilhelm has learned and undergone up until this point. But another answer does arrive later from a different source—Makarie, Hersilie’s celestially-minded aunt, first introduced in the company of an astronomer. Makarie emerges as a direct counterpoint to Jarno, the earthbound scold who, in attempting to adapt to the spirit of the times, has been defeated by them. Though the novel ends with Wilhelm and Natalie reuniting, the extracts from Makarie’s archives, a collection of aphorisms on science, nature, the arts, and culture, provide the novel’s proper conclusion. These push toward a suppler, less absolutist conception of the whole and what it would mean to commune with it.

Unlike the coercive pedagogical projects Wilhelm has observed, in Makarie’s notes the whole and its parts constitute a kind of endogamous unity, each arising out of the other. Though this knowledge can eventually be put to use, it empowers the mind precisely because it is able to slip free of utility’s totalitarian demands. It refuses to mutilate the part to force its place in a predetermined whole. “Steine sind stumme Lehrer,” one aphorism runs, “sie machen den Beobachter stumm, und das Beste, was man von ihnen lernt, ist nicht mitzuteilen” (HA 8:476; Rocks are mute teachers, they render the observer mute, and the best thing one can learn from them cannot be shared). Another reads: “Etwas Mönchisch-Hagelstolzenartiges hat die Kristallographie und ist daher sich selbst genug. Von praktischer Lebenseinwirkung ist sie nicht; den die köstlichen Erzeugnisse ihres Gebiets, die kristallinischen Edelsteine, müssen erst zugeschliffen werden, ehe wir unsere Frauen damit schmücken können” (HA 8:477; Crystallography has something monastic and celibate about it, and is therefore sufficient unto itself. It can have no practical influence on life, since even the most exquisite products of this field must be cut and polished before one can adorn our women with them). And yet another: “Die wahren Weisen fragen, wie sich die Sache verhalte in sich selbst und zu anderen Dingen, unbekümmert um den Nutzen, d.h. um die Anwendung auf das Bekannte und zum Leben Notwendige, welche ganz andere Geister [. . .] schon finden werden” (HA 8:472; The truly wise inquire into the nature of the matter and its relationship to other things without regard to its utility, i.e. about how it can be applied and equipped to what is essential for life, which quite different minds [. . .] will discover soon enough).

Conclusion

One recognizes here the theory of active affects from Book Four of Spinoza’s Ethics, joined to the theory of knowledge Goethe was so taken with in Book Five. For Spinoza, the mind frees itself from the bondage of passion by understanding its necessary connection with the single whole constituted by the laws of nature—with God himself. In the godless world of the Wanderjahre, however, the decaying bonds of state, religion, history, culture, and custom have all but dissolved. There is no whole to know, no whole to reconcile oneself into. Instead, the novel posits the possibility of a world of singular objects, scientific and cultural, organic and inorganic, man-made and natural, encompassing all of existence, all of which, together, make up a plurality of wholes, a thousand plateaus, each constituting its own distinct unity whose contemplation empowers and expands the self against the historical forces simultaneously hemming it in and tearing it apart. This knowledge is modeled for the reader by the heterogeneous structure of the novel itself. Its wholeness is imposed not by authorial intention—throughout, the narrator’s fallibility and deviation from actual events is repeatedly emphasized, in counterpoint to the all-knowing, all-ironizing narrator of the Lehrjahre—but by coaxing the reader into developing a wholeness adequate to its plurality and his own.

  1. Julie D. Prandi, Dare To Be Happy! A Study of Goethe’s Ethics (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993). ↩
  2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche, eds. Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et. al., 40 vols. (Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–2013). All translations are the author’s own. ↩
  3. Goethe, Werke, eds Erich Trunz, Wolf Kayser, et al. 14 vols. (Hamburg: C.H. Beck, 1998). ↩
  4. Gerhard Kaiser and Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1978). ↩
  5. Kaiser and Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel, 18–19. ↩
  6. Kaiser and Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel, 19. ↩
  7. Kaiser and Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel, 19. ↩
  8. Eckart Förster, “Goethe’s Spinozism,” in Spinoza and German Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 85–99, here 86. ↩
  9. Förster, “Goethe’s Spinozism,” 88. ↩
  10. Förster, “Goethe’s Spinozism,” 91. ↩
  11. Prandi, Dare To Be Happy!, 85 ↩
  12. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980), 38. ↩
  13. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 38. ↩

Works Cited and Further Reading

  • Adorno, Theodor W. Minima Moralia. Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1980.
  • Förster, Eckart. “Goethe’s Spinozism.” In Spinoza and German Idealism, edited by Eckart Förster and Yitzhak Y. Melamed, 85–99. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.
  • Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebücher und Gespräche (FA = Frankfurter Ausgabe). Edited by Hendrik Birus, Dieter Borchmeyer, Karl Eibl, et al. 40 vols. Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–2013.
  • ———. Werke (HA = Hamburger Ausgabe). Edited by Erich Trunz, Wolf Kayser, et al. 14 vols. Hamburg: C.H. Beck, 1998.
  • Kaiser, Gerhard, and Friedrich A. Kittler. Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1978).
  • Prandi, Julie D. Dare to be Happy! A Study of Goethe’s Ethics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.
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