Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Goethe & Newspapers



Earlier in Dichtung und Wahrheit Goethe warns of the danger of withdrawing from political life. Goethe’s own life and his own characters show that Goethe wrestled with the question of how to balance the responsibilities of an active life and the need to withdraw into solitude.

Yet, in the fourth part of Dichtung und Wahrheit (published after his death), Goethe recommends reading newspapers as a way for ordinary citizens to become involved in politics, even if they do not hold office. He suggests that newspapers serve two important functions. First, they allow citizens to view current events as one would watch a play at the theater; they can enter into the partisan spirit of events, but “in an innocent way.” For Goethe, newspapers can play a role similar to that of catharsis in Aristotle’s Poetics. Second, reading newspapers helps citizens learn how to make moral judgments, so that they will praise what is good and condemn what is bad.

But, do newspapers really encourage prudence and catharsis? Perhaps they did in Goethe’s day. Reading newspapers was once a much more genteel and leisurely activity than it is now. In the mid-nineteenth century Schopenhauer every day (after playing the flute and walking his poodle) would leave his apartment to stroll to a nearby café to peruse the foreign dailies in order to collect more evidence for his pessimistic worldview. Schopenhauer taking a break while reading the paper projects an image of thought and not mere gossip-mongering.

Today, though, it is much harder to agree with Goethe’s positive assessment of newspapers. In the internet age, it is difficult to appreciate just how influential newspapers became in the decades after his death in 1832. But, back in the day when newspapers competed for readers in every major city in America and Europe, a breaking news story was like a video going viral today; newspapers were the catalyst for mass enthusiasms. Becoming too involved with newspapers, then, would seem to represent exactly the danger that Goethe was warning against earlier in Dichtung und Wahrheit. The partisan spirit would not be innocent, but would lead to rash reactions, and there would be little catharsis but much anxiety from attending to current events. Indeed, newspapers then and today often contain shoddy fact-checking, shallow analysis, and pure sensationalism, which, instead of cleansing the reader’s emotions, make the reader keep returning for updates. Newspapers can inflame the partisan spirit, as Goethe said, but they hardly produce catharsis or prudence. This partisan spirit becomes a passion as base as any other.

To avoid arousing the partisan spirit and to develop an aesthetic experience of politics, the simple solution is to stop reading newspapers so much and to start reading good histories. If writing history is an art, much of the art consists of telling a story about a specific crisis. In English, the word "crisis" can be used to indicate any important moment, usually involving stress for the actors involved. This definition, though, does not fully describe what a crisis is. The original Greek meaning of the word--"judgment"--gives a better idea of how reading history can lead to catharsis. A crisis is an important moment because it gives us the necessary opportunity to pass judgment on the character of a person; how the person deals with this moment in his life reveals more about his character than other moments because life is lived more intensely at certain moments than at others. Witnessing the intensity of a crisis through the eyes of a sympathetic historian can produce catharsis in the reader, who participates in the character's actions. History draws the reader deeper into the action, while news stories are content to leave the reader at a superficial level. And it is the depths of history which can teach us about politics better than any newspaper story.

2 comments:

Aaron Linderman said...

Two thoughts come to mind: (1) What might be the present-day equivalent of newspapers? Some, such as the FT or the Economist (magazine) offer insightful commentary. But perhaps something like The Daily Show offers more of an insight into the common man's understanding of news, while still providing some level of comment.

(2) While histories may provide better insight into human nature, it seems to me Goethe sought a balance between the active and contemplative; one could acknowledge the shortcomings of newspapers while still recommending them because, unlike histories, they pertain directly to the present day and the active world of politics.

Stephen said...

(1) I don't read the FT or Economist, but is their commentary always that insightful? I've found in the last few years--since law school--that if a journalist is talking about a legal subject I know something about, he's usually wrong. And it's not that I'm some kind of genius, it's just ignorance on the journalist's part.

(2) While it's true that Goethe sought a balance between the active and the contemplative, I think maybe Ortega y Gasset was right: unless you already have extensive knowledge about history and a foreign culture, you won't really understand what the news is saying. Ortega was no armchair philosopher--he sat in the Spanish parliament before 1936--but he saw the disastrous effects that uninformed opinion could have on internal politics and foreign policy.

Of course, even if we want to follow Goethe's approach, another objection could be raised against newspaper: they make us feel as if we are really participating in politics, even though most of us really have no effective participation in politics.

None of this is to say, of course, that I've stopped reading newspapers entirely. But, I definitely read more selectively and much more skeptically.