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.

Goethe's Father and Aestheticism

As a brief addendum to my most recent post, this passage from Book II of Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, shows that Goethe was well aware of the danger of withdrawing from politics and choosing to live an apolitical, "aesthetic" life because of the example of his own father:

In a city like Frankfurt, where the inhabitants are divided among three religions into three unequal groups, where only a few men, even from among the ruling classes, can join the regiment, there must be many a prosperous and educated man who retreats into himself and constructs for himself his own closed-off existence with his studies and hobbies...Now, my father was one those men who had retreated, who never form a partnership among each other. They assume a position as isolated from each other as from the whole [of society], and even more so because in their isolation they develop idiosyncratic qualities that set them off even more starkly from each other. My father had acquired on his journeys and in the free world a conception of a more elegant and more liberal way of life than was perhaps usual among his fellow citizens. He certainly had predecessors and companions [in this regard].

Goethe then proceeds to describe a number of men from his childhood in Frankfurt who, in one way or another, lived a quieter, more "aesthetic" life. They were men of means who enjoyed poetry and who often collected antiques, paintings, and plants, to the point that their houses must have been small museums. Goethe's father, for example, had a room filled with pictures of Italy and had very strong views concerning poetry (he hated Klopstock).

But, as devoted as these men were to their own private hobbies, they did not abandon the public sphere. One wrote didactic novels in an attempt to foster morality among the aristocracy and bourgeoisie, and another wrote a book advocating toleration for Calvinists as well as Lutherans in Frankfurt. One man gave alms regularly and encourage the poor to reform their lives. A doctor transformed his large home into a state-of-the-art medical school. Goethe characterized all these men as having withdrawn from public life, but they were by no means hermits. What made them unusual for their time and place was that they were wealthy yet did not enter into politics or assume a public office.

The example of these apolitical, yet publicly-minded men leaves open the question of what kind of life a publicly-minded man should lead, a question that concerned Goethe throughout his life. Goethe's ideal in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was the active (tätig) man. But, what kind of activity was ideal? Should the active man vie for public honors, or should he simply carry out his profession well? Should he perhaps establish a private association intended to benefit the public, such as providing medical care to the poor? As Goethe recognizes, it is impossible in our age for many of those who enjoy some modicum of financial security to enter into politics. Yet what Goethe here criticizes in Dichtung und Wahrheit would actually seem better than the alternative: it is better to find some small way to increase the common weal rather than to indulge in what Goethe calls the bourgeois tendency to become engaged in politics simply by giving an opinion on every distant world event.

Politicism and Aestheticism

In histories of German literature, there is an idea one hears quite a bit, which attempts to explain the sudden flourishing of German literature beginning in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, dating roughly from the publication of the first three books of Klopstock's Messias in 1748 to the revolutions of 1848. According to this theory the writers of the Sturm und Drang and the Romantics, in particular, devoted themselves to literature because they had no other outlet for their energies, as the ascendant German bourgeoisie was still excluded from political life. This theory has at least three important effects. First, it establishes aesthetics and politics as completely inimical to each other, rather than simply in tension with each other. Second, this theory implies that all aesthetics is really just aestheticism and leads to political quietism. Lastly, and most importantly, it precludes the possibility that politics can degenerate into what, for lack of a better term, can be called "politicism," where the daily struggle of party politics becomes the good citizen's only concern.

This interpretation of German literature probably originated with Heinrich Heine, the self-named "last Romantic poet." Heine was certainly not a man without a strong aesthetic sensibility, as any reading of his Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs)will prove. Yet even early in his career Heine began to make controversial political statements, with his opinions leaning toward socialism (he became acquainted with the young Karl Marx in Paris). His radical opinions and his penchant for ridiculing his enemies meant that he had to endure censorship in Germany nearly his entire life. While Heine appears to have already formed his revolutionary political views by the time he left university, part of his disenchantment with the apolitical nature of German literary culture, and above all with Goethe, may stem from his disappointing visit to Goethe. After publishing his first poems as a law student, Heine sent a copy of the book to Goethe, and two years later made something of a pilgrimage through the Harz Mountains to Goethe. In Weimar, though, the great poet gave Heine a cool reception, and Heine, rather uncharacteristically (since he loved to talk about himself), never spoke of the incident again. But among the writers of the Vormärz, Goethe came to be regarded as the epitome of a conservative German aestheticism that refused to sully itself with politics and rejected all reform movements out of hand.

This interpretation of German literature before Heine is certainly not indefensible. The frustration felt by the rising generations at being unable to take on political responsibility comes through in certain authors, such as in Friedrich Hölderlin's Hyperion. The young, idealistic title character joins in a Greek rebellion against the Turks (a couple decades before Byron). But, more importantly, Hyperion falls in love and explores his emotions in the letters he writes to his German friend Bellarmin. After suffering defeat in battle and the death of his lover, Diotima, Hyperion returns to Greece to live as a hermit contemplating the beauty of nature while nurturing his sorrow over Diotima's untimely death. The conclusion of the novel indeed leaves the impression that Hölderlin saw devotion to the aesthetic as mere consolation for failure in politics and love.

The frustration seething in the writers of the Sturm und Drang took even more dramatic form than the early Romanticism of Hyperion. For instance, in Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), the protagonist Ferdinand, as the result of a court intrigue, decides to kill himself and his love, Luise. Here, not even aesthetics can save the young idealist and make life tolerable after failure in affairs both public and private. Indeed, even though he later became the symbol of German political passivity, Goethe first came to the public's attention as an enfant terrible, whose Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) ends once again with the protagonist's suicide after he has been thwarted in his ambitions by a court society prejudiced against the middle class, and by an unhappy love affair. This epistolary novel was so shocking to contemporaries in part because it inspired a wave of copy-cat suicides who dressed as Werther before discharging pistols into their (already empty) brains. Werther is perhaps the most famous expression of political frustration that came out of the Sturm und Drang and is still the epitome of Liebestod in German literature before Wagner's operas.

But, the later Schiller and especially the later Goethe show the limits of the idea that German literature before the Vormärz was simply a means for the ascendant bourgeoisie to sublimate its political aspirations into safer activities. While Schiller is sometimes remembered, especially in the English-speaking world, primarily for his "Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind," he also taught history at the University of Jena. He was deeply interested in the political history of the Netherlands whose republicanism he admired, as well as the Thirty Years' War. His most famous plays, such as Wilhelm Tell, Wallenstein, and Maria Stuart, are all classical in aesthetics, but take their inspiration from politics and history.

Goethe's case is more complicated than Schiller's because he took a sharper turn towards aesthetics. Goethe came from a family of lawyers (his maternal grandfather was something like the chief justice of the city of Frankfurt) and even became a lawyer himself, first as an intern at the supreme court of the Holy Roman Empire in Wetzlar, and then as a private attorney in Frankfurt for a couple years before entering the service of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar. Once in Weimar, he became one of the Duke's chief advisers and filled many administrative posts. However, Goethe was never completely happy as a man of action. In 1786, without asking permission first, he left Weimar and Carlsbad and traveled to Italy, touring most of the peninsula as well as Sicily for a couple years. It was in Italy that he matured as a writer and a man, rejecting the excesses of his Sturm und Drang phase and re-founding his aesthetics on the classicism of his day.

Nevertheless, upon his return to Weimar, while he was relieved of certain administrative duties, the Duke still entrusted him with the direction of the court theater and of the University of Jena. Moreover, in his later classically-inspired works, Goethe does not present complete withdrawal from the world as his ideal. In Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, the prototype of the Bildungsroman) the hero rejects the aesthetic life of a wandering actor for a more settled life of responsibility. Even the life of quiet contemplation, which is presented sympathetically in the famous diary of the schöne Seele ("beautiful soul"), is ultimately rejected as an evasion of responsibility. Even in Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), Goethe introduces Eduard as a man who has chosen to retire to his country estate, a decision, however, that would lead to the end of his marriage. Despite his clearly conflicted feelings about the desirability of living in society--Goethe became known for treating strangers (such as Heine) very coldly in an attempt to protect his privacy--as well as his later avoidance of political questions, it can be said that Goethe recognized that it was good to live among others and to assume responsibility in life. As much as he devoted himself to aesthetics, the charge against him that he was uninterested in politics is false.

The Weimarer Klassik of Schiller and Goethe represents not a flight from reality into aestheticism but rather an attempt to unite life, including politics, with aesthetics. Schiller and Goethe advocated a politically involved life, but also insisted on keeping involvement in politics within certain bounds. In the French Revolution and in their own experiences they saw how a certain type of passion for politics and social change could harm the common good and blind the individual soul. Before accusing Schiller and Goethe of aestheticism, then, one must first eschew politicism.

Creepy Aesthetes & The Cult of Genius

The last time that I mentioned Goethe's Italian Journey, I commended Goethe for seeking to understand art as art, not by using lots of big words and abstract nouns to praise the artist's genius, but by examining the artist's hisotrical background and limitations. In other words, he actually studied the art, and so he knew how to judge the art as art. However, the following passage shows that just because an artist knows how to judge art as art or create beautiful art, he doesn't necessarily know how to judge art in relation to other things, such as morality.

The day before yesterday I visited Lord Hamilton at his villa near Posillipo. One cannot imagine a more glorious sight on God's green earth. After our meal, a dozen youths swam in the sea--that was a beautiful sight. The many groups they formed and the poses they struck while playing! He pays them to do this, so that he might have this pleasure every afternoon. (Letter from Tischbein to Goethe, Italian Journey; July 10, 1787)

Did anything there strike you as strange? How about the last line about paying boys to swim by his villa (pictured below)? I thought that was strange. Why does this strike me (and many others, I presume) as a bit, well, creepy?

There are two reasons. First, there are the obvious homoerotic and pederastic overtones here--paying for the sight of young boys wearing little or no clothing. Certainly, most fathers would not be happy when he found out some old man was enticing his son to take off his clothes for his pleasure.

However, that doesn't explain Goethe, Tischbein, and Lord Hamilton. There's no evidence that any of these men was a pederast. Indeed, Lord Hamilton kept a young, nubile woman, Emma Hart (pictured below), at his villa for "aesthetic purposes." Goethe mentions elsewhere (March 16, 1787) that Emma would dance for guests wearing only light sheets and pose for painters in very artistic poses, such as a devotee of Bacchus, or as Ariadne. However, the oddity of Lord Hamilton's relationship to Emma doesn't end there; he later actually married her, despite the unseemly difference in age between the two. But, it doesn't end there either. He later encouraged her to become Horatio Nelson's lover, and even shared his home with the couple and with Emma's mother. This behavior is certainly strange, and repulsive, but it has nothing to do with pederasty.

There must then be a second reason why this all seems a little creepy: Lord Hamilton (and perhaps Goethe and Tischbein too) treated Emma Hart and the young swimmers simply as pieces of art. They seemed to think that their aesthetic interests--enjoying the beauty of the human form--took priority over normal ethical rules, especially those concerning sex. They didn't even need to maintain the appearance of propriety, because they were above all those petty rules.

This isn't the only example of an aesthete who thinks that the normal rules of morality don't apply to him. The obvious contempoary example is Roman Polanski. Whatever the artistic merits of his films, they simply do not excuse the crime to which he pleaded guilty. Listening to his "aesthetic" friends from Hollywood and France, however, you could be forgiven for thinking that child rape is not a crime when committed by a great director.

What explains the difficulty that some artists and other aesthetic types have in recognizing what for most people are clear ethical boundaries? My only explanation is that some artists are prone to genius-worship. They think that anyone capable of creating beauty in a work of art should therefore be free to create beauty in their own lives--by their own standards. The artist as a god: that is the essence of the modern cult of genius.

This obviously is not meant as a smear on all artists. All this tells us is that being an artist does not by itself qualify someone to speak on matters of morality. Conversely, however, being a good person does not qualify someone to speak as an expert on matters of art. However, in today's world, where the cult of genius is so prevalent, there is a temptation for artists, or anyone who wants to be a genius, to construct his own moral universe. Geniuses, however, have to live by the same rules we all do.

The Importance of Limitations

There is a certain type of empirical judgment [concerning art], which has spread due to the influence of English and French travelers. One expresses one’s spontaneous, unprepared opinion without giving any thought at all to the fact that every artist is subject to many conditions, such as his own special talent, his predecessors and teachers, his time and place, his patrons and customers. None of this—which would of course be required for a pure appreciation—comes into consideration, and so there develops a dreadful mixture of praise and censure, of affirmation and rejection; as a result, every value proper to the works in question is annulled.
—Goethe, Italian Journey, Report for December 1787

Many people, I would venture to guess, unconsciously think like Platonists, at least when it comes to art. They’ve learned from a certain caricature of art critics to talk about art using only abstract nouns starting with capital letters. They speak in grandiose terms about Beauty, as if beauty existed apart from works of art. When they do this, they think they are preserving beauty, and art for art’s sake—but they really don't know much about beauty. (This, of course, excludes the not inconsiderable group of people who think art should be about whatever they feel like, not necessarily about beauty. I won't even bother with them.)

But, as Goethe points out, these amateur art critics do not know much about the individual artist or work of art in question. They have no idea who the artist's teachers were, what his patron demanded of him, or what techniques and materials were available at the time.

This ignorance of history, according to Goethe, is so distressing because it prevents critics from coming to a “pure appreciation.” This is a striking phrase, especially in combination with his initial rejection of a certain type of empiricism. How can Goethe call for more history and reject empiricism? First of all, what he means by empiricism is not an emphasis on concrete, verifiable facts; what he means, rather, is the theory that the human mind is a tabula rasa that can judge correctly about any sense impression it receives, without anything further work required. In other words, Goethe is saying that learning to appreciate art is hard work, and part of that hard work involves learning the historical background about the art we are trying to appreciate.

Second, many people—those everyday Platonists—would argue that what leads us to a “pure appreciation” of art is abstraction from history. The work of art has a value which is independent of the “dirty” complications of history. What does it matter, they argue, what the limitations on an artist were? His work is immortal!

But, in fact, what makes that work of art immortal are the limitations on the artist. Every time an artist chooses to include one type of excellence in his work, he must exclude another type of excellence. For instance, an architect cannot choose both a pointed Gothic arch and a round Baroque arch for the same part of his building. A sculptor must decide whether he wants to use wood, marble, or some other medium for his statue. A painter must decide whether to use oil or water colors. In the end, though, what is really important is how the artist works within these limitations but transcends them. Our limitations are what make perfection possible for us. And--Goethe's point again--only a detailed knowledge and analysis of the artist's limitations will help us come to a "pure appreciation" of the artist's transcendence of his limitations.

Compartmentalization

At the very beginning of his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe describes the house he grew up in, with special emphasis on one room in particular. It was a large, open room located on the ground floor. It had a sitting area for the household staff with a partial opening on to the street, so that visitors and passers-by could come and go easily. Goethe and his sister could play in this room, and could also easily communicate with their friends and neighbors. This room brought work and play together, as well as the public and the private. Goethe concludes his description with this sentence: “One felt free insofar as one was comfortable with the public.”

This room exemplifies the proper integration of different aspects of our lives we must seek to achieve in our own lives, and which we as a society must strive to achieve. The nuclear family did not feel under siege from the outside world, nor were recreation and labor mutually exclusive. Family life was important, but it did not need an oppressive shelter to flourish. This older arrangement of the household is at odds with our modern approach. Today, Goethe's father (a wealthy, influential citizen of Frankfurt) probably would have lived in a suburb with restrictive zoning laws not allowing stores or businesses anywhere near homes. Furthermore, no extended household (including servants) would be allowed on the property, or at the very least would be strongly discouraged. If Goethe and his sister wanted to play, their mother would probably have to drive them to a park. Goethe’s last sentence today would have been: “One did not feel free unless one’s private (non-economic) life was completely separated from one's public (economic) life.” However, family life today is weaker despite the efforts we make to protect it from the outside.

This separation of the public from the private, of the economic from the non-economic, is present in other areas of society, and I will give three specific examples below: art, exercise, and nature. What unites all three examples is that in each case we attempt to protect a particular good from the encroachments of the economic by assigning it a separate compartment. Yet we fail precisely because each good, once it has been restricted to a distinct sphere, is less able to influence the economic realm and everyday life.

First, consider art museums. Many philosophers and artists in the 19th and 20th century established a strict dichotomy between work and art, in order to glorify art all the more, with some even elevating it to the status of a religion. Accordingly, many shrines to art have been erected in the form of grand museums. The Art Institute of Chicago, for instance, is a world-famous museum housed in a building reminiscent of a classical temple—and it even has two lions to guard the sanctuary. Yet how relevant is art today? Has the separation of art from other institutions in society really improved modern man’s aesthetic judgment and his overall taste? Probably not. Visiting an art museum on vacation is merely a civic duty, rather than true enrichment.

Second, consider exercise. More than one commentator has remarked on modern Americans’ worship of physical perfection, embodied in a nearly obsessive concern with exercise (think of gym memberships), yet the average American grows fatter from year to year, despite warnings about the dangers of obesity. We have, on the one hand, lengthened the average person’s life expectancy by relieving him of the necessity of performing hard physical labor in order to earn his daily wage, but we have simultaneously harmed his health by relieving him of this necessity. We separate work from physical activity to help ourselves, but in the end only create new problems.

Finally, think of how America sets aside more and more land as “nature reserves” and some environmentalists seem to worship nature, yet fewer and fewer people are really in touch with nature on a daily basis. At best, the average American spends a week camping or hiking in a national park, but out of touch with nature for the remaining 51 weeks of the year. One writer (Nicolás Gómez Dávila) has even warned of the danger that an “age is upon us in which nature, displaced by man, will not survive except in arboretums and museums.”

Priests and pastors have long admonished their congregations not to restrict religion to Sundays; instead, they must let their faith permeate their daily activities. The same applies to all other areas of life. Art, exercise, and nature must be released from their holding cells and be free to influence society at large. There is no easy way to do this. However, I would suggest that one rule will apply generally: The only way to integrate all these separate goods into society is under the aegis of a single “architectonic” institution with the breadth of vision to encompass them all, to allow them all space for development yet also impose limits on them. Art and nature will not be worshiped, but nor will they be denigrated; each in its proper place. Until we recover some conception of an architectonic institution that can give order to the various goods, our compartmentalization of these goods will only hurt them in the long run.

Identity Issues

What shook me and put me to shame was the disparity between my personal rank and the resounding extravagance of world history marking the crisis of my fortieth year [the outbreak of World War I]. No doubt, it is fate to be so placed in time that the beginning of a new phase in one’s personal life coincides with a catastrophe of historic proportions. Happy—I often thought in those years—happy is he who for his entire life is allowed to feel the same cultural ground beneath him. Many an hour I spent with the writings, notes, and epigrams in which Goethe sought to deal with the French Revolution, and it was a comfort to me to see how this great man, who also imagined he would keep the same societal and intellectual ground under his feet, experienced such difficulty in coming to terms with the new, and to incorporate it into his world and his work.

--Thomas Mann, “Gegen Recht und Wahrheit,” in “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen”

Who am I, where do I come from, that I cannot make or wish myself to be different? That is the question to which one seeks an answer in times of spiritual anguish.

--Thomas Mann, “Die Bürgerlichkeit,” in “Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen”

I just wanted to bring these two quotes to your attention. They strike me as unquestionably true, but I sometimes have a hard time saying why. The question of personal identity is of course deeply personal—but it can never be answered without relation to others around us.

When I learn to speak, I speak with “the other”; I address that other person (usually my father or mother) in the second person singular—thou. (This idea I owe to Martin Buber, of course.)

I think this observation can be extended a little further so that it sheds some more light on my question. Once I become aware of a “thou,” I also become aware of a “we.” I, even as a little baby, know that my mother and father are not completely separate from me, but are instead deeply attached to me. Just as I cannot define myself apart from a “thou,” I cannot identify who I am apart from a larger group, the “we.”

I hope you’ve stuck with me so far; I apologize for writing like a German philosopher. I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: A change in the “we” necessarily causes a change in the “I.” Being human means being exposed to these changes and being changed by others. And, what is the price of that change, at least for most people? Anguish.

Nevertheless, the individual’s task is to make sure that change is for the better, even if society changes for the worse. Or, to put it another way, the individual must react to changes (and thereby change himself), and even suffer anguish in the process, but the individual is still free to choose how to react (and thereby change himself). He can react for better or for worse; he can change for better or for worse. In the end, though, I suppose that happiness is not possible without anguish.