John Armstrong
LOVE, LIFE, GOETHE
How to be happy in an imperfect world
512pp. Allen Lane. Paperback, £16.99.
0 713 99679 X
Shortly after Goethe’s death, one of his contemporaries complained that he found “nothing more repugnant, and at the same time more ludicrous, than the relentlessness with which everyone has a go at Goethe, demanding that he should have been someone different from the person he was – that he should not have been Goethe”. Such negativity (which forms the reverse of the other historical strategy, to co-opt Goethe for chauvinistic, nationalist purposes) persists in what one might call Goethe’s “image problem”. The attitude to him of Germany’s cultural institutions can sometimes seem less than enthusiastic. Nor is it just his countrymen who display this lack of sympathy: in the English-speaking world, neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes, neither Racine nor Dante, it seems, can arouse such hostile passions as does the figure of Goethe. Why should this be the case? In Love, Life, Goethe: How to be happy in an imperfect world, John Armstrong suggests that the source of this image problem does not lie in Goethe – on the contrary, it lies in us.
Armstrong seeks to challenge some of the negative preconceptions surrounding this central figure of German – and European – culture, and to show why Goethe still has much to tell us. Perhaps it is not surprising that an “outsider”, inasmuch as its author is not a scholar of German literature, should have written this reappraisal, one that presents Goethe, not as a “received, oppressive” figure, but as “something one might try to escape to” . Following his previous reflections on love (Conditions of Love: The philosophy of intimacy, 2002) and on art (The Secret Power of Beauty, 2004), Armstrong’s latest book sets itself the task of considering how “getting to know Goethe” might enrich life. On this “friendship-model” of investigation (as Armstrong calls it), the aim is not simply to know as much as possible about Goethe’s life, but to investigate the extent to which knowing about Goethe might help us in ours. For behind many of the expressions of hostility and resentment towards Goethe, there lies, Armstrong shrewdly suggests, a “fear” of his subject as a “reproach” – the logic being that “the seriousness, the happiness and the success of Goethe’s life make our own lives seen shabby and incomplete”.
For Armstrong, Goethe offers such an important model because “he integrates material and emotional stability with an astonishingly fertile creative life”. In Goethe’s criticism of one of his own contemporaries, the hypochondriac and depressive philosopher Friedrich Plessing, Armstrong locates a corrective to “the spiritual sickness of modernity”, an affliction of Goethe’s time – and, by extension, of our own. In effect, Armstrong proposes to view Goethe in a tradition reaching back to Epicurus and Lucretius (in a conversation with Johann Daniel Falk, Goethe once spoke, only half-jokingly, about some people being born as “half-Stoics, half-Epicureans”). So perhaps it would not be wrong to ascribe to Goethe the outlook of philosophical hedonism, in the sense that term is used by Michel Onfray. In fact, Armstrong seems to place Goethe squarely in this hedonist tradition when he claims Goethe thought that “the goal of individual life” is “happiness”, and that “happiness is intimately related to pleasure”; Armstrong is dismissive of the “recurrent motif” of Goethe scholarship (particularly the psychoanalytic variety) which tries to prove Goethe was “unhappy or psychologically disturbed”. Instead, Armstrong presents Goethe as the champion of a “cheerful pessimism”, defined as the attempt “to see life as it is and yet to enjoy it as it is”.
Together with Schiller, Goethe outlined a view of art, now dubbed “Weimar classicism”, which seeks, Armstrong contends, “to promote a kind of lucid inner stillness and equilibrium”, “to heal us, to soothe our agitation and focus our strength”. From this perspective the author offers an overview of Goethe’s central works (including Werther, the Wilhelm Meister novels and, of course, Faust). From various pieces of biographical evidence, Armstrong sketches Goethe’s political philosophy, and he persuasively argues for the importance of Goethe’s scientific work. Some of the smallest details of his biography are shown to yield an unexpected significance: for example, his meticulousness in keeping accounts. (When Sulpiz Boisserée, the collector of medieval German art, visited the poet in 1814, he remarked how close an eye Goethe kept on the household expenditure.) Behaviour which might, to some, appear as no more than a fussy obsession, serves, for Armstrong, as evidence of how Goethe introduced his conception of art into the everyday, seeking “to bring clarity where there was confusion, to introduce elegance and coherence into the potential mess of daily life’”.
But does Armstrong’s approach offer us a “pop-psychological” Goethe, reducing the great writer to nothing more than a lifestyle guru or to the level of a self-help therapy group? Thankfully, Armstrong avoids this pitfall: he notes the role, in Goethe’s concept of happiness, of “renunciation” or “resignation”, recalling how Spinoza (arguably Goethe’s favourite philosopher) recognized that “all noble things are as difficult as they are rare”. Armstrong’s style of writing demonstrates the same preference for dry articulation and arch understatement one finds in, say, Alain de Botton, Adam Phillips, or Darian Leader; sustained over 400 pages, it contrasts strongly with the dynamic and highly structured rhetoric of Goethe’s prose. Then again, Love, Life, Goethe is not intended as an exercise in imitatio (unlike, in other words, Thomas Mann’s essays on Goethe and Mann’s novel Lotte in Weimar). As a non-expert, Armstrong may be forgiven his reliance on a limited range of Goethe scholarship (as a result of which he omits to mention much critical literature on Goethe that would have served to support his case).
The author’s approach is, admittedly, not entirely novel. After all, the ideal of wholeness Goethe is said to have embodied attracted the attention of Nietzsche, who praised him for his “aspiration to totality” (an attitude he called Dionysian). In 1935, dismayed by the abuse of Goethe in the Third Reich, Robert D’Harcourt published a short study entitled Goethe et l’art de vivre, which covers some similar terrain to Armstrong’s book. And, in 1949, Jean-François Angelloz, responding to the anti-Goethean polemic of Karl Jaspers, argued that Goethe had a “saving part” to play in the political and intellectual recovery of post-war Europe. More recently, in a series of conversations published under the congenial title of La Philosophie comme manière de vivre (2001), the French scholar Pierre Hadot has announced his plan for a study of Goethe, not as an Olympian figure, but as a man “torn between terror and wonder”. (Hadot’s previous work on the meaning of the “present instant” in Faust entirely confirms Armstrong’s thesis about Goethe’s insistence on practical solutions to the problems of the here-and-now.) Given the (manifest) imperfections of our world, however, Armstrong’s book stands out as timely. In the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, one of the characters advises that “every single day one should listen to a little song, read a good poem, look at a fine painting and, if possible, say a few sensible words”. A deceptively simple programme, though no less valuable (or any easier to put into practice) for that. In its turn, Love, Life, Goethe offers us the chance to read some “sensible words” about a figure “whose time”, as John Armstrong says, “has never come”, but whose time is “always”.
