Goethe and Freedom of Speech (2)

My last post concerned Goethe's implicit recognition that freedom of speech, insofar as it concerns the right of citizens to "participate in the discussion by which the people govern themselves through the formation of public opinion" (as James Weinstein puts it in his introduction to the recently published Extreme Speech and Democracy), is a feature of modern liberal states. I say "implicit," because Goethe was not directly addressing the issue of freedom of speech but rather writing about the absence of drama in "Persian poetry": despots don't want dialogue. In the process, he was pointing out a substantial difference between the Middle East and the West, particularly as the institutions of the West were then developing in the direction of greater civil liberties.

The "Noten und Abhandlungen" to West-East Divan, in which these remarks on despots appear, impressively document Goethe's wide reading and thoughtfully cultivated conclusions. I am surprised they have not yet been translated into English. They have given me much to think about recently, as I work my way through this long reflection on "Eastern" cultures. But the implications concerning freedom of speech and opinion really got me to thinking when I came across Stanley Fish's blog post on the "imperial" Obama. Fish, as he writes, has been struck by the difference in language since Obama became president. While Obama when he began his campaign in February 2007 spoke of a project "larger than his personal ambitions" and made frequent use of the pronoun "we" to speak of what would be accomplished in his administration, everything altered with the inaugural address. As Fish writes: "The promises are now made to an America that is asked only to stand by while they are fulfilled."

In the address to Congress on February 24, for instance, "the royal we has flowered into the naked 'I,'" eight "right off the bat," according to Fish. And when, so Fish continues, Obama thanks Canada and Germany, "it is as if those sovereign nations were doing him a personal favor to which he was entitled. When he invokes 'my administration' you might think he was talking about some prized possession. (My daughter ... my ducats.)" You get the picture.

Fish thinks that Obama likes the sound of his own voice. I don't hold this against the president. After all, as Fish asks, don't we all like the sound of our own voices?

There is, however, something less seemly going on, and it is occurring among the people who should be reporting on the president's grand ambitions, which, as Robert Samuelson writes in The Washington Post, include an expansion of health-care subsidies, tightly controlled energy use, and the greatest growth of government since Lyndon Johnson. Samuelson asks: "Are any of his proposals practical, even desirable? ... What might be the unintended consequences?" You get the picture.

Instead, according to Phil Bronstein (editor at large of the San Francisco Chronicle), the press is failing to fulfill its own First Amendment role, namely, to offer the public a range of information and viewpoints and to serve as "a forum where people can venture and exchange ideas independently of government interests" (as Dieter Grimm has written in his contribution to Extreme Speech and Democracy). The media, like the fawning courtiers serving  a despot, are content to publish the administration's own "official" view of itself. Again, one can't blame Obama for acting like an emperor since the press is so clearly of the opinion that he should be one. The media, despite its claims to the contrary, is clearly uncomfortable with the messiness of the democratic process. Journalists nowadays take the position of Rousseau who went so far, in Julie and Emile, as to declare that true communication was the avoidance of words. Thus, the General Will emerges from "the voice of duty," not from the opinions of individuals. The press in the U.S. is only too happy to serve Obama's imperial ambitions.

For me, the most disturbing instance of failure of the press concerns the president's defense of the "right" of Muslim women to wear the hijab. Ask the gal pictured below, being hectored in Tehran by a morals policewoman, whether she feels empowered with full-body covering. Will the press allow Obama to come down on both sides of the issue in the present turmoil in Iran? The Pew report, comparing Obama's press coverage with that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, made this comment: "Obama, by contrast, while he has had good weeks and bad in the media, has managed to recover from the rough ones by changing tactics and redirecting the narrative." Goethe recognized this pre-democratic ruling style.

Goethe and Free Speech

In truth, Goethe never directly addressed the issue on which I am currently working, in connection with the volume on the 18th-century history of free speech. I wrote on Goethe's absence from this debate in an earlier post. The past days, however, I have been reading the "Noten und Abhandlungen" that Goethe appended to the West-East Divan and have discovered some comments that address the issue.

About half way through the "Notes" (I am referring to p. 169 of the Hamburg edition), in the section entitled "Doubts" (Zweifel) Goethe mentions that a Westerner (Westländer) can never be entirely comfortable with "Persian poetry." 

It is not, he writes, the religion that distances us from this poetry, for the unity of God, the submission to His will, the prophets, and so on are also elements of our own beliefs and, indeed, our Scriptures are the basis for the Islamic ones. We have also been long acquainted with "Märchen" from the Middle East, and even its mysticism should not be too foreign to us. But, then, he puts his finger on the problem:

What is beyond the capacity of the Westerner to understand is the spiritual and bodily obsequiousness to rulers and masters, a practice of the most ancient times when kings were representatives of God. 

In the Old Testament we read without any particular displeasure of men and women throwing themselves on their faces and worshiping priests and heroes, for they were accustomed to doing the same before "Elohim." What began as a natural pious feeling transformed itself later into tedious courtly ritual. ... Many Western diplomatic missions have come to grief with this ceremony in Eastern courts ... Which Westerner can find it endurable that the Oriental not only presses his head nine times to the earth, but that he even tosses it away, for any cause or goal?

Goethe then describes a courtly sport known as "Maillespiel," a very rough version of croquet, in which a box-wood ball, a foot in circumference, is struck with a mallet (Schlägel) down an alley through a number of arches and hoops. (Click on image at the top for the course of the game. The history of the sport can be found here in English.) He quotes lines by the poet Dschami, from Hammer's edition, in which this extreme becomes a method of gaining the ruler's attention: the poet offers his own head as the ball.

Wie lang wirst ohne Hand und Fuß

Du noch des Schicksals Ballen sein!

Und überspringst du hundert Bahnen,

Dem Schlägel kannst du nicht entfliehen.

Leg auf des Schahes Bahn den Kopf,

Vielleicht daß er dich doch erblickt.

(I translate only the final two lines: Lay your head on the Shah's track; perhaps he will then notice you.) Goethe gives a few more examples of this sort, from Hafis. He adds that a deeper study of the subject might show that earlier poets (i.e., before the Golden Age of Persian poetry that is his subject) were more modest in their expression of such obsequiousness and, moreover, that later poets did not take these abuses (Mißbräuche) seriously, but, using the same poetic language, loved them for their parodic value.

Okay, I am getting to the free speech part. After a discussion of the characteristics of Persian poetry, he makes the interesting observation (HA, p. 189) that there is no drama in Persian poesy. "Had a dramatic poet been able to arise [aufstehen], its entire literature would have had a completely different aspect."

The nation [!] is inclined to silence [zur Ruhe geneigt]. It likes to be read aloud to, thus the countless fairytales and the endless poems. Oriental life is otherwise not talkative. Despotism has no need of dialogue [Wechselreden]. Thus we find that objections to the will and commands of the ruler appear only in quotations in the Koran and in lines from well-known poets, the understanding of which require intelligence [einen geistreichen Zustand] and deep, wide, and rigorous education [Bildung].

Thus, though Goethe never addressed the subject of free speech in connection with Europe (at least not so far as I have discovered), his acquaintance with the Middle East through the poetry led him to make observations that are relevant to the current issue of free speech and that also show his reflections concerning what has become the foundation of modern Western political life: Europeans were used to speaking out against their rulers. There was an important exception within the Enlightenment, namely, under the "enlightened monarch" Catherine in Russia, which I hope to touch on in my next post.

Picture credits: BMI magazine "Voyager" (Persian storyteller); the Ancient Web (Darius of Persia)