Goethe, Marx, Utopia

Rene Magritte, Applied Dialectics (1945)

I was reading Friedrich Engel's "Socialism: Utopian and Socialist" the other day, and I couldn't help sensing that some of the terminology reminded me of Goethe. The piece begins with a criticism of utopian thinkers, those men who believed that "pure reason and justice have not hitherto ruled the world" because these have not been properly understood. "The solution of social problems ... the Utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. Society presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason." What these earlier utopists (Saint Simon, Fourier, Owen) failed to understand, despite their considerable merits, was that there existed a chain of necessity in historical development and that solutions to the "social problem" would not come with well-intentioned piecemeal changes. There were laws governing change, and, if the conditions on the ground were not correct, the class divisions would continue.

It is in the second section, when Engels begins to speak of Hegel and dialectics, that I discerned echoes of Goethe. Engels criticizes the metaphysician, for whom "a thing either exists or does not exist. ... Positive and negative absolutely exclude one another; cause and effect stand in a rigid antithesis to one another." He goes on to say, of the metaphysical mode of thought, that it forgets the connection between individual things; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and the end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion." It was after reading the following paragraph that I wrote in the margin, "I can see why Marx was attracted to Goethe." Here is what Marx's partner wrote:

"Further, we find upon closer investigation that the two poles of an antithesis, positive and negative, e.g., are as inseparable as they are opposed, and that despite all their opposition they mutually interpenetrate."

I won't go on, but he is describing the principle of dialectics, of which nature is the proof. Nature works dialectically, not metaphysically.

Rene Magritte, In Praise of Dialectics (1937)

It was at this point that I turned to the Goethe-Handbuch, but there was no article on Marx. Online, however, I found article by Elmar Treptow (Z. f. philosoph. Forschung, vol. 34 [1980]), "Zu Marx' Aufhebung der Metamorphosenlehre Goethes." It opens with the claim that both Marxist scholarship and Goethe scholarship have overlooked the influence of Goethe's MM "Lehre" on Marxist thought, in particular for the Marxist understanding of society and its formation. Treptow proposes to show that Das Kapital is a MMLehre, appropriating Goethe's morphology in order to offer a critical demonstration of an incorrect, "alienated" social metamorphosis.

Characteristic of Goethe's morphology is an aversion to isolation of facts and "mere empirical treatment." As Treptow points out, Goethe applies metamorphoses to the "natural world," organic and inorganic. Variations and manifestations, from the simplest to the compounded, progress according to laws (though excluding a telos of final causes). The foundational law is "Gleichgewicht": nothing can be added to one part that is not subtracted from the other.

Goethe, as Treptow also points out, did not conceptualize human history in morphological terms (though Herder does refer to metamorphosis in his philosophy of the history of humanity). He posited no social "Grundform" that would correspond, e.g, to the "Urpflanze." And while Goethe does not mingle nature and art, art's productive "Formieren" stands in direct connection with nature's likewise productive "Formieren," namely, via "Bildungstrieb." And it is this that influenced Marx, according to Treptow, particularly the concept of "Formenwandel."

Looking back on his Strassburg days, Goethe wrote of his revulsion at the materialism of Holbach's La System de la natur. According to the Wikipedia entry on this work, "mind is identified with brain, there is no 'soul' without a living body, the world is governed by strict deterministic laws, free will is an illusion, there are no final causes, and whatever happens takes place because it inexorably must." But Marxism is materialism with a twist: it has a soul! It was from Hegel, not Goethe, that Marx and Engels drew their notion of "Geist" directing history. Otherwise, I can't see much difference from Holbach's materialism.

There are more echoes of Goethe in Engel's piece. Treptow also mentions that Marx writes of economic "Keimform" or "Zellenform," of the "sinnlichen übersinlichen Wertdings," and of the "Verwandlung" of goods into money and money into goods. Goethe's "structural-genetic" morphology, however, has its "Fundament" in real processes of nature; Marx's is genetic only in terms of logic, or dialectics.

Picture credit: 4 x Complementary

A Founding Father Visits Goethe in Weimar

I had lunch yesterday in the Village with Clark Muenzer. Goethe was one of the subjects of conversation, not surprising since Clark is a Goethe scholar and the incoming president of the Goethe Society of North America. He asked me if I knew that Aaron Burr had visited Goethe in Weimar. As a matter of fact, I did know, having come across that information in Ernst Beutler's article on Goethe, "Von der Ilm zum Susquehanna." Burr, according to Beutler, was the first America that Goethe met face to face, in 1810.

Burr had served with great distinction in several major Revolutionary War battles, yet fell into bitter political rivalry with both Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Burr, while serving as vice president of the U.S. under  Jefferson, shot Hamilton in a duel, after which his star began to fade. His involvement with a land purchase scheme in the Louisiana Purchase territory led to a charge of treason; Jefferson did his best to see that Burr was convicted, but failed. At the time Burr met Goethe, he had been living for two years in Europe, having fled the U.S. to escape his creditors. It was a sad trajectory for this Founding Father, who is mainly known today for the duel with Hamilton. Historians believe that Hamilton, who had brought the pistols, intended to have an unfair advantage over Burr, a plan that backfired, so to speak.

In his own diary Burr wrote on January 4 and 7: "chez Goethe." Goethe also mentioned meeting "Obrist Burr aus Nordamerika" on January 4, and again on the evening of February 10. Beutler writes: "What the two spoke about, or the impression they had of each other, remains unknown."

Burr was an Enlightenment man. As a New York assembly member, he sought to end slavery in the state in 1784. He believed that women were the intellectual equal of men; a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft graced his office. He submitted a bill in the New York State legislature that would have allowed women to vote. Moreover, he was the grandson of the great American theologian Jonathan Edwards. (See this site for more information on Burr.) Yes, one would like to know what he and Goethe talked about. One suspects they spoke in French.

Goethe and utopia

Military in the Communist Utopia of North Korea

My reading on utopia has lent some insight into why Goethe seems not to have been tempted by wishful visions of a harmonious society. In an essay entitled "The City and Utopia," Louis Mumford writes of the immunity to change of Plato's ideal Republic:

"Once formed, the pattern of order remains static, as in the insect societies to which it bears a close resemblance. ... From the first, a kind of mechanical utility afflicts all utopias. On the most generous interpretation, this is due to the tendency of the mind, or at least of language, noted by Bergson, to fix and geometrize all forms of motion and organic change: to arrest life in order to understand it, to kill the organism in order to control it, to combat the ceaseless process of self-transformation which lies at the very origin of the species. All ideal models have this same life-arresting, if not life-denying, property."

(The essay appeared in the Spring 1965 issue of Daedalus on the subject of utopia.)

As early as The Sorrows of Young Werther one hears in Goethe's writings a complaint against the scholar who removes life from the object of study. "Dogmatiker" is another term for the "Gelehrten," as in a letter to Merck: "Es gibt eine andere Art Eigentum für den Gelehrten oder den Dogmatiker, das ist die Gewohnheit, die Begriffe, die er schon erworben hat, die Gesetze, die er gefunden hat, als festgesetzt anzusehen."

Goethe went on to have lots of contact with scholars, in particular scientific men, but his orientation was not to set up systems. Utopias are about "Dauer," not "Wechsel," and they are accompanied by mechanisms that keep things static, fixed, regimented, and standardized. I wonder if Goethe's ambivalent attitude toward military matters plays a role here. After all, before the advent of the factory age, which institution in society was more regimented?

Photo credit: The Politics e-Zine

Cosmopolitanism

Scythian horseman

I was reading this morning an essay by Susan M. Shell on "Kant's Conception of the Nation-State and the Idea of Europe" (to be found in this volume). I referred in an earlier posting to Rousseau's animus against cosmopolitanism. In a note Shell quotes Rousseau from Emile on this subject: "The Europeans are no longer Gauls, Germans, Iberians, and Allobroges. They are nothing but Scythians who have degenerated in various ways."

The quote is interesting. Is Rousseau assuming there was a "European" identity, or may he simply be referring to the various peoples who occupied "continental" Europe?

Certainly cosmopolitanism was not spread simply by the advance of Enlightenment ideas. I have been arguing for a long time that the spread of "Enlightenment" was as much due to commerce as to the power of ideas simply sweeping aside superannuated notions and prejudices. "Europeanism," however, also had a material component, the spread of similar goods and services across a region uniting people in habits on consumption and manners. It is become conventional wisdom that trade and commerce and the long-range communications that result are evil. Thus, Rousseau, who linked commerce to the decay of manners. I don't know, however, if he specifically linked it with cosmopolitanism. Here is another Frenchman, François-Noel Babeuf (1760-1797), discoursing on greed, who must be considered a utopian:

"Society must be made to operate in such a way that it eradicates once and for all the desire of a man to become richer, or wiser, or more powerful than others."

Similarly, Morelly in Code de la Nature, of 1755:

"The only vice that I perceive in the universe is Avarice; all the others, by whatever name they be known, are only variations, degrees, of this one."

I don't believe Goethe ever discoursed in this way, though I am willing to be corrected.

Photo credit: Fravahr

The starry skies above

Beethoven vor nächtlichem Sternenhimmel (Richard Pfeiffer)

The back problem continues today. Thus, another day on my back in bed, which has its positive side. It is rather meditative, because I don't get up and move around. Thank goodness I have a laptop. I have spoiled myself, for instance, allowing myself a second cup of tea in the afternoon. It is true that I can stand and walk, but sitting for any length of time is out of the question. Last evening I ventured out for a lecture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and am paying the price today.

In connection with the Beethoven string quartets being performed there, the Met has offered two lectures on Beethoven. The one last evening on Beethoven and the Romantic sublime was by Marsha Morton of the Pratt Institute. It was an excellent paper, but I am not sure what the general Met audience took away from the presentation, even if it was accompanied by slides: references to Wackenroder, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Kant, and Schiller's essay on the poetry of Friedrich von Matthisson are only a few of the names that flew around fast and furious.

In contrast, Edmund Morris's talk three days before on the effect of Beethoven's deafness on his late works was audience-friendly, with a lot of learning dished out in small doses and enlivened with audio clips and with Morris himself at the piano illustrating some of his points.

Nevertheless, both presentations helped me to understand why I find Beethoven's music, aside from the sonatas, so torturous to listen to. Morton concentrated on the dissonance, irregularity, bombast, and so on that characterize the aesthetics of the sublime in the late 18th and early 19th century. Early critics of Beethoven, finding him unlistenable, remarked on just these characteristics. Morton gave credit to E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose  essay on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony fashioned the new and appreciative reception of Beethoven.

Beethoven watches over Liszt's performance (Josef Danhauser, 1840)

It wouldn't be a contemporary talk if gender issues were not introduced, in particular the "masculine" qualities of the sublime (already discussed by Edmund Burke) and thus sublime music, according to Morton became more and more eroticized by the time of Liszt.

The title of Edmund Morris's talk was "The Roar That Lies on the Other Side of Silence," and he made a plausible case for the effect of Beethoven's early tinnitus and the drumming and roaring in his ears as deafness set in. According to the program, "Beethoven's most exquisite (or sometimes frightening) effects may have arisen from his deafness."

Well, one man's exquisite is another man's torture. When I first met Rick, my husband, he was part of a music group that met monthly to listen to music, with one person each time presenting new recordings. One of the members of the group, quite knowledgeable, nevertheless hated what she called "nervous music"; thus, the group didn't listen to music written after Schubert's death, 1828. Rick was more ecumenical. Toward the end he especially liked Mahler.

The final audio clip of Morris's presentation was the full recording of "Meeresstille," which Morris prefaced by noting that Goethe had not even responded after  Beethoven had sent him the score. I had to laugh at that, especially after hearing the recording. No doubt, I am one of those people who prefer pleasant (angenehme) music. I presume Goethe was also. As I wrote in an essay a few years ago, Goethe seems to have put the sublime behind him quite early, way before the Romantic writers took it up.

Picture credit: Beethoven Haus, Bonn; Objective Art

Cosmopolitanism

I hurt my back at the gym yesterday and ended up on my back most of the day. I listened to Rousseau's The Social Contract (1762), recorded by LibriVox. The readers are a mixed lot, not as good as the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences. Still, a good way to spend the day when I could barely walk and found it difficult to read in a prone position.

About a year ago I took the above picture, because the advertisement reflects what I have noticed about European tourists in New York. One used to be able to tell Germans apart from the French or the Scandinavians, the Spanish from the Italians, and so on. Germans do wear strange eyeglasses, not to mention their color sense is really weird, but nowadays Europeans are practically indistinguishable. Rousseau seems to have made a similar observation, according to David A. Bell (writing in The New Republic):

"Rousseau loathed cosmopolitanism, and believed in the deliberate cultivation of national identity. In one of his lesser political works, he lamented the fact that 'today, no matter what people may say, there are no longer any Frenchmen, Germans, Spaniards, or even Englishmen; there are only Europeans. All have the same tastes, the same passions, the same manners [ ...] all talk of the public welfare, and think only of themselves.'"

Goethe and Rousseau

Yesterday I made chili, and, what do you know, it actually tasted like chili. In between I was reading Rousseau, mostly in connection with the 18th-century roots of modern utopian thinking, on which I will be giving a paper at a conference in September.

 My reading up until now suggests that two of the major utopian ventures in the 19th century, those of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, were influenced principally by the "rationalists" among the Enlightenment. This rationalism is graphically expressed in the architecture of the Owenite and Fourier settlements.

And in particular in the writings of Robert Owen, one gets the feeling that he believed that once people "saw the light" concerning social ills they would immediately convert to a rational program of amending these ills. Edward Bellamy, clearly inspired by such rationalism, wrote a novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, in which all the ills of a future society had been eliminated. The life of this new society, however, in the words of William Morris, was that of a "machine life." Morris writes of Bellamy: "His only idea of making labour tolerable is to decrease the amount of its by means of ever fresh developments in machinery."

Preparing the ingredients

 (Virginia Woolf, reviewing in 1918 a novel entitled A Practical Utopia, wrote that "too much stress seems to be laid upon the development of electricity and too little upon the development of humanity. ... It is comparatively easy to imagine a town clear of smoke, or dinner raised by touching a switch, or an entire house run by a competent engineer in the basement.")

I bring in Morris because he had a different vision of utopia, which he described in his review of Bellamy's novel. namely, a society in which every citizen felt himself to be responsible for and interested in the details of its administration, in which "the business of life" was not shuffled off "on to the shoulders of an abstraction called the State," and in which "variety of life" was as much society's aim as "equality of condition."

The vegetables are cooking

This is a long way around of getting to Rousseau and Goethe, but Morris's utopian vision was a "small state solution," and the "romance" he wrote portraying it, News from Nowhere, was influenced by the "creative" Rousseau, a man of the heart and passions. It was this Rousseau that had an effect on the Sturm und Drang Goethe. This morning I finished rereading Rousseau's 1750 essay on the effect of the arts and sciences upon morals. What a screed! But Werther's criticisms of "scholars" and the imagery of virtue and innocence in Lotte's quasi-idyllic life in The Sorrows of Young Werther certainly owe a lot to Rousseau's prelapsarian projections. Idylls and utopian literature have much in common, lacking the so-called evils of civilized life against which Rousseau anathematized.

Goethe would seem not to have taken Rousseau's writings on political theory into account, e.g., The Social Contract (1762), although he must certainly have known of these writings, especially after the French revolutionaries claimed Rousseau as one of their own. The opening of Article 6 of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen certainly draws on Rousseau: "Law is the expression of the general will." Because of the excesses of the French Revolution it may have followed that Rousseau himself was to blame. After all, had he not written in The Social Contract: "Individuals become citizens by surrendering their private interests and opinions to the 'general will'"?

Almost ready to eat

Rather than presaging totalitarianism, the term "general will" reminds me instead of Adam Smith's use of the term "invisible hand." Smith meant by this the process by which markets automatically channel self-interest toward socially desirable ends. Rousseau's amour propre and pitié were the sentiments in humans that also allowed them to think beyond their private interests and, instead, in terms of others and thus the interests of all. (I was interested to see that the editor of my Rousseau edition claims that ethically the "General Will" is "one and the same as Kant's concept of moral rationality.") Of course, Rousseau also inveighed against money and trade as contemporary perversions of morals. He would not have understood that markets can be moral. (More on this another time.)

Goethe was not a political thinker like Kant or Rousseau. He was a practical man, hardened by work in the administration of the duchy. His own ideas on a future in which people would not be at war or enmity were contained in the concept of "world literature." But more on that later, too.