Going On

This essay investigates the philosophical commitments and the editorial means by which Goethe achieves the impression of narrative continuity in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. Proceeding from a consideration of continuity as a foundational philosophical and aesthetic problem, Goethe’s striking decisions to establish and manage divisions in the novel’s text appear as concerted attempts to move the sources of continuity into the intradiegetic domain. The interlacing of various levels of interruption—between chapters, books, and volumes—creates a poetics of caesurae that helps explain the overwhelming impression of natural growth created by the first edition of the novel. A look back on the Lehrjahre from the perspective of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and its scathing indictment of serialized publications further illuminates the interplay of philosophical, narratological, and editorial factors in the creation of the paradigmatic Bildungsroman.

Seeing Faces in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

This essay explores Goethe’s use of physiognomic description in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, arguing that the novel exhibits a general shift from such use—in the theater, for instance—to the model of self-development (Bildung) promoted by the Society of the Tower. In the 1770s, Goethe had fallen under the influence of J. C. Lavater, although his attitude toward the supposed “science” of physiognomics tended to waver, and he rejected Lavater’s appeal to transcendent fate. Many passages in Meister call on characters, narrator, and reader alike to make sense of physical appearance, with no interpretive rules available. Faces and situations seem radically individual, which makes for realistic effects yet also leaves an impression of uncertainty. Goethe’s motto “Individuum est ineffabile” harbors the problem of how to discern or describe difference. With Bildung, Wilhelm tries another way to square individuality with the larger whole. But in Goethe’s telling, Wilhelm experiences disillusionment there, too.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides context for the volume’s subsequent contributions on Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship on a variety of levels. It begins by explaining its aims with regard to the relationship between philosophy and literature. It then locates Goethe’s novel within this set of aims in three ways: first, by providing a brief outline of Goethe’s career; second, by locating his novel in the literary-historical context of late eighteenth-century Europe; and third, by outlining the connections between the Goethe of Wilhelm Meister and specific philosophers and thinkers who influenced his thought and for whom his work was in turn influential.

Narrative Direction

This essay approaches Goethe’s novel from the perspective of historical shifts and new poetic models in the late eighteenth century, which took the form of a feeling of increased contingency or randomness in an individual’s life. It argues that Goethe uses narrative techniques to create a balance between the episodic and the developmental, the parts of the novel and its trajectory as a whole. Wilhelm’s character development and these formal characteristics combine to solicit imaginative engagement on the part of readers of the novel, who, in thinking about these things, may come to a better understanding of the contingency in their own lives. The essay argues that Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship offers not only a detailed depiction of contingency in human life but also a suggestion that aesthetic experience might hold out the possibility of acknowledging and managing that contingency to create a sense of purpose and meaning.

The Novel of Its Times

This chapter examines how the theme of Bildung so central to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is bound up with a set of issues involving the relation between life and literature—the concerns philosophers and literary theorists have explored in light of famous problems of fictionality and theatricality, as well as more widely in terms of how artistic irony is engaged with the world itself and what sorts of strategies of narrative revision might be required for that engagement (as Goethe himself, attached to the themes and central character of his novel for more than five decades, clearly thought).

Goethe as Philosopher

This chapter explores the only apparent contradiction between Goethe’s profession of a lack of talent for philosophy and the significant reciprocal intellectual influence that existed between Goethe and leading philosophers of his time, including Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling. The essay traces the development of Goethe’s interest in philosophy in the years preceding the publication of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship as he pursues the possibility of some form of “intuitive” (nondiscursive) understanding. This path appears to have grown especially at the start from Goethe’s interest in botany and in Spinoza’s notion of a scientia intuitiva. The full shape of Goethe’s reflections on this issue ultimately involve his engagement with Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment as well as with a set of reflections on how one might be able to construe a “complete series” of developmental transitions.

Playing and Reality

Analyzing Wilhelm’s love affair with the theater and the beautiful soul’s particular kind of piety, this article shows how Goethe’s novel supports a growing person’s narcissistic infatuations and illusions by way of assigning to them a propaedeutic function, as it also affirms the nexus between those illusions and their external, material support in such transitional objects as toys, visual artifacts, or—in the case of the beautiful soul—devotional guides and prayer books. This kind of illusion is not to be terminated by way of disillusionment, by way of a confrontation with reality. Instead, it is to be supplanted through the encounter with a distinct model of art. It is when faced with Shakespeare’s oeuvre and with the uncle’s art collection that Wilhelm and the beautiful soul acquire a larger perspective on the self and the world, for it is then that the work of art as an autonomous whole comes into play.

Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister

This chapter details Goethe’s influence on the development of early German Romantic philosophy. It explores some of the reasons why Goethe became a leading literary influence on early German Romantic philosophy. The unique literary style of the early German Romantics is presented; in particular, their fusion of literary and philosophical approaches to central philosophical issues is explored. The modern spirit that unified Goethe and Schlegel is presented as the motivation for Schlegel’s turn to Goethe’s work. Finally, Schlegel’s analysis of Wilhelm Meister is presented as a Romantic ideal of art.

Hegel and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

This essay examines Hegel’s interpretation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. It argues that, for Hegel, the archetypal modern novel depicts the struggles of idealistic youth as an “apprenticeship” that ends with the young man concerned becoming reconciled to the social order around him. The essay then looks closely at Goethe’s novel and assesses to what extent Hegel’s interpretation does justice to it. The conclusion is that it does, even though it overlooks many significant details. The essay then briefly compares Goethe’s novel with Hegel’s Phenomenology, which is itself often regarded as a “novel of education,” and notes that in both cases a self-absorbed consciousness is gradually transformed into one that finds satisfaction in mutual recognition. The essay concludes by comparing the accounts given by Hegel and Goethe of Hamlet and the beautiful soul.

Agency and Embodiment in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship

This chapter examines the question of agency in Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, paying particular attention to the role of physicality and movement. It explores the ways in which characters’ embodied interactions with the world and with one another might express, or represent an attempt to express, agency. The novel is full of striking depictions of bodies in motion, and the chapter analyzes the idiosyncratic physical behaviors of the key characters—in particular, but not exclusively, of the female characters. In each case, conclusions can be drawn, on the basis of their gestures and movements, about the degree of agency which they are able to command. Yet the balance is always shifting, for power and freedom must be continually negotiated and renegotiated. The novel tracks this, too, and reveals a constant give and take between the characters and the world against which their lives take shape.