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c h a p t e r 3 Goethe Contra rousseau on Social responsibility Both Goethe and rousseau framed their versions of the subject in terms not only of passion, explored in the previous chapter, but also in terms of the individual’s place in society. renaissance man though he was, Goethe did not write essays in political theory and cannot be compared directly to rousseau in that respect. rather, his response to rousseau’s social thought can be read first in the conversation his novel of education, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), conducts with Émile, ou De l’éducation (1762; Emile, or On Education), and second in his use of the Reveries in Faust, part 1 (1808). Between Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften Goethe only rarely expressed himself explicitly about rousseau, but in these two major works of the 1790s it is possible to trace the shifts in his attitude, and the trajectory is telling. The first step is his enthusiasm for the pedagogical views laid down in Emile, expressed primarily in his participation in educating Charlotte von Stein’s son Fritz. By the time of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which takes on not only rousseau’s pedagogy but also his social theory, enthusiasm has shifted to critique. The tension between individual and society that appeared as solipsism in Werther appears in the context of education as, increasingly, egoism. The social critique becomes more severe with the completion of part 1 of Faust in the last years of the 1790s and first years of the new century. In effect, then, Goethe spent the late 1780s and especially the 1790s working through the social implications of rousseau’s new subject. Though Werther and Die Wahlverwandtschaften treat selves in closed worlds, society in a test tube, as the chemical title of the second novel implies, nevertheless both Goethe and rousseau knew that selves exist in societies; the 36 the problem more complicated that self was, the more important and difficult it became to integrate it into society. John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) already posited a self not rationally preformed, but inscribed onto the blank slate of the infant mind. rousseau, it might be said, wanted to peer into that blankness, and so the exploding interest in education in the late eighteenth century, fueled in part by Emile, also expresses an exploding interest in the unconscious or irrational self. Education, Bildung, thus became another important space of Goethe’s encounter with rousseau. But the world to which youth of the late eighteenth century were being educated was also oppressively political as the French revolution loomed ever more threateningly, and rousseau was one of its most influential harbingers. Thus Goethe’s ambivalence toward rousseau had to extend also into the political sphere, and that aspect appears most clearly in the first part of Faust, which frames the great political meltdown of the revolution and the terror: the Gretchen tragedy was drafted in the mid-1770s, while almost the entire remainder of part 1 that surrounds it was composed between 1797 and 1801. It also frames the composition of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, which took place between 1777 and 1796. In these two most important of his works, Goethe explores his ambivalence toward rousseau’s social views, so that rousseau was the crucial subtext for his social and educational thinking in the 1790s.1 While Goethe does not address politics directly in either of these texts, his position on rousseau’s devastating importance for the French revolution turns out to be very close to that of Hannah arendt in The Human Condition, a text that in turn will illuminate the reading of Faust offered here. Education: Wilhelm Meister and Emile Goethe’s interest in rousseau’s child-rearing principles dates to his Sturm und Drang period: by 1775 he was personally acquainted with two of the three leading German language pedagogues of his day, Johann Bernhard Basedow (1724–90, with whom he traveled in 1774) and Johann Heinrich Campe (1746–1818, tutor of the Humboldt brothers; Goethe met him in 1776). The two ran a school in Dessau, the Philanthropinum, which was organized on the principles of Emile. The third, Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827), also strongly influenced by rousseau, was known to Goethe by reputation, though not as early as the other two. Goethe himself was notorious for living back-to-nature principles from Emile, such as bathing naked outdoors in [3.140.198.43] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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