Goethe as a Conservative Thinker



by Rolf Gruner, Ph.D. 

Goethe is invoked by people of all kinds, from mystics to materialists; but his official reputation, in his homeland and elsewhere, is that of a great humanist. This is why after the war he could be made to stand for The Other Germany, why the German Communists celebrated him as anticipator of their own Socialist Humanism, why German cultural propaganda abroad is conducted via a body called the Goethe Institute. Yet calling him a humanist would be correct only if humanism were exhausted by the spirit of humaneness. A man may be inhumane out of insensibility or out of fanaticism, in the service of some cause or idea, and Goethe was neither; in some of his works rather, he exhibited to perfection the nobility of humaneness. But his is also supposed to have celebrated Man and represented human strivings as glorious, with the converse that he played down human weakness and folly, and perhaps the corollary that he was humanitarian, liberal and optimistic. All this must be rejected.

Goethe is also viewed by some as a reactionary, because he refused to join the Progressive Forces, and he did not try to understand the aspirations of The People and so on. Fart from speaking against Goethe however, it speaks for him, and he joined distinguished company amongst his contemporaries such as the Duke of Wellington. It has only been invented or adapted by progressivists as a counter-image to themselves, to brand anyone who poses the change which they count as good and necessary because they count them as progressive. For such people any true conservative will be a reactionary.

Nevertheless Goethe was no conservative thinker if that is taken to imply that he was a traditionalist man of his stature could not possibly be that. As he declined the name ‘friend of the existing state’ since it was far from being always admirable, so he recognized that all tradition petrifies and ‘all order becomes pedantic in the end’. At the same time he also knew we cannot do without either, are fated forever to dissolve and re-establish them anew. Secondly, Goethe was no conservative thinker if that is taken to imply some concern with political theory, while he often referred to Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant, he never alluded to their political philosophy.

But a thinker need not be a theorist, and the acknowledgement of eternal strife between tradition and innovation is part of that realism which should characterize a good conservative. If then one also remembers such Goethean maxims as that a wise ruler treats men as they are, nor as they ought to be, and one who reigns long will become less prompt in trying to avert evils, since he has seen so many rectify themselves; the title of this article seems justified. Although conservatism may be supported by theory it is itself a state of mind; like skepticism it belongs to a man’s character. In the case of Goethe it seems particularly appropriate to look first at some general traits and attitudes before considering his views on politics.

In the first place stands self-mastery; here was a man who felt intensely, yet was equal to every situation, who knew passion but always kept a grip on himself, would could write Werther without becoming Werther. When he was accused of having caused the suicide of many a youth with this book he replied that he had only rid the world of a ‘dozen blockheads and good for nothings’. It is because of this ability to avoid being carried away that some accused him of being cold, including such celebrated poets as Coleridge and Wordsworth.

Goethe was naive in the old sense that he did not engage in self-analysis or cultivate his self-centeredness. He though it wrong to attempt ‘catching one’s mind in its operations’, preferred that the principles from which he worked should be hidden from him, and jokingly accounted for his literary success in these terms: ‘My child, I have been very wise: I have never thought about thinking (Der Sammler und die Seinige). A consequence was his dislike of self-analysts or self-torturers, of ‘problematic natures who cannot cope with any circumstances in which they find themselves, and are never satisfied with any’. Having known in his youth several men with a tendency to suicide or madness he later kept such characters at arm’s length. So he is criticized for having neglected Hölderlin and been unkind to Kleist, of whom the first died in an insane asylum and the second by his own hand. But he freely acknowledge talent even when it displeased him (and did put on one of Kleist’s plays in the Weimar theatre).
Goethe took men as he found them, as ‘fixed natures that cannot act otherwise than they do’. Consequently he neither was indignant at their behavior nor tried to reform them or change their opinions:

Let in error them continue,
And try wisely to escape;
Safely gain the open spaces
And pull no one after you.
(and telling found truth is not insisting on its acceptance).

What is more, he did not feign feelings or opinions he did not have, in order to please others or meet common expectations.

Goethe was of an active disposition and unafraid of responsibility. Not only did he fill various posts in the Weimar government, and took part in two military campaigns, he also acted energetically as a private man when he thought it necessary. In 1793 he stopped a crowd from lynching some German Jacobins who attempted to escape from Mainz after the French republicans had surrendered it; ‘I will rather commit an injustice,’ he commented afterwards, ‘than put up with disorder’. And he disliked any passive complainer, found it ‘distasteful to have such a rankled near to one who, inactive, is always wailing that things are not as they ought to be’.

Goethe detested quarrels and arguments, their only outcome being that ‘opposing ways of thinking express themselves quite distinctly, and everyone sticks to his own all the more’; for ‘on-one is convinced by the reasons of his enemies’ besides ‘one should never speak of one’s own and others’ faults, least of all in public, ‘unless one aims at effecting something useful by it’; one should rather be glad ‘that man has still virtues since his vices go without saying’.
Goethe took the accusation that he was too selfish to lend his weight to a cause with equanimity: ‘people always demand I should take sides; all right then, I stand on my own side’. A poet, he thought must strive ‘to be permeated by the conditions of both the warring factions’ and is lost as a poet when ‘he wants to have any political effect’. What is more, no party can be completely in the right, yet everyone must pretend that it is; ‘the grotesquerie of party-spirit’, therefore, is even more repugnant ‘than any other caricature’ yet it is also ineradicable; for though in politics people forever toss and turn ‘as on a sickbed, in the belief that they will lie better’, since any and egotism are always with us ‘the conflict between parties has no end’.

Goethe was antipathetic to censoriousness, inclusion self-censoriousness, for having a too tender conscience only shows that ‘only esteem one’s moral self so highly that one wants to forgive it nothing’, and furthermore ‘the active man is concerned to do what is right; whether the right is being done should not bother him’: the Portuguese delegate at the Vienna Congress was thus quite justified to veto any discussion of the slave trade on the ground that the assembly had not met ‘to form a world-court of justice or to fix the principles of morality’.
As might be expected, Goethe disliked world improvers and enthusiasts and felt that any political idealism was misplaced; thus Saint-Simonism is ‘totally unpractical and impracticable’ for ‘idea and common reality must remain strictly separate’, and as soon as an idea begins to be realized it approaches fantasy or fancy, which is why ‘the ideologue has been so very odious to the briskly active, practical man of the day’; as regards any outright enthusiasm:

Every enthusiast, let him be
Crucified when he is thirty;
Once the deceived knows the
World a deceiver he will be
himself.


Goethe’s attitude to post-Kantian German philosophy was skeptical, though he made allowances: ‘if men en masse were not so pitiful, philosophers wouldn’t need to be so absurd’; yet ‘what are the English and the French to think of our philosoophers’ language when we German don’t understand it ourselves?’. The fact is that he was not in sympathy with the Idealists’ typical endears; the notion of the Autonomy of Reason, the belief that art and nature are in need of Mediation through Concepts, were foreign to him.

More immediately relevant to Goethe’s political stance, and requiring some special treatment, is another skepticism, that towards historical knowledge and speculation. Written history he called ‘a great euphemism’; compared to the fullness of life the most detailed historical account contains very little, and even of that nothing is beyond all doubt; reading history also becomes increasingly disagreeable since with the passing of time people have to distill more and more subtle results from the past; as for so called World History this is just ‘a tissue of nonsense for the higher thinker’. And contrary to any notion of history as the Realm of Freedom he spoke of the great events of the time as ‘streams and rivers which with natural necessity rush together’ till they cause ‘an inundation in which those perish who foresaw it as well as those who had no inkling. In this immense empirical process you see nothing but nature, nothing of what we philosophers would love to call freedom’.

This understanding of history protected him from any Idea of Progress. When he talked of advancing (fortrücken) and progressing (fortschreiten) he referred to individuals, not mankind, or to reversible processes of limited duration. While the core of universal progress is always the advance of knowledge, together with the augmentation of autonomy and rationality, Goethe on numerous occasions stated the opposite:

What’s true was found in ages
Past,
Has joined all minds of noble
Cast;
The ancient truth, you seize it (Vermächnis)

“It is laughable when the philistines pride themselves in the greater insight and enlightenment of their age…Intelligence is as old as the world’; all that is clever has already been thought, one must only try to think it once more, an endeavor which can have no end because it is natural for error to re-establish itself when some superior mind has got it out of the way; any difficulties are insurmountable; Ireland, for instance, ‘suffers from misfortunes which cannot be removed by any means, including any emancipation’; so long as the world stands the rulers will abuse their power while the ruled will not be content with a moderate condition nor can eternal peace between states be hoped for; at best was might become ‘less cruel, victory less arrogant’ as for human happiness generally, ‘men’s circumstances have been miserable at all times and in all lands. They have always feared and toiled, tormented and tortured each other…’

Goethe saw the present age as a declining one because it is subjective, whereas in times of greatness men’s endeavors are directed away from the inner life to the outer world and when humanitarianism triumphs one days it is also t be feared that ‘at the same time the world will become a great hospital with men as one another’s humane nurses; even now the courage to be and show what one is has been lost and life is ‘tame and weak’. The historian Niebuhr was right when he saw barbarian times coming; ‘they are already here; we are living right in them; for in what does barbarism consist but in failing to acknowledge excellent’ as for technology this, in alliance with bad taste (Abgeschmacktheit), is ‘the most deadly foe of art’, and its perfection also precludes ‘art in everything which belongs to life’s enjoyment, comfort and so on’. The striving for speed and wealth was for Goethe a real curse, and from ‘velocity’ and Lucifer he formed an adjective for it veloziferisch.

His views of the political events of the time are consistent with this outlook; the greatest of these was the French Revolution. Many of his educated contemporaries, and writers in particular, were at first fervently in its favor and then just as fervently opposed, though there were also some like Hegel who remained its friends for ever. Goethe belonged to the small minority who loathed it from beginning to end. For this he was not forgiven, in particular since he had also written two comedies (Der Bürgergeneral and Die Aufgeregten, 1793) in which he ridiculed German would-be revolutionaries. These he saw as ‘cracked, even base people’. Elsewhere he observed that it is often weak people who ‘have revolutionary opinions believing that they would be at ease if they were not governed and failing to perceive their unfitness to govern either themselves or others’.

He found the French Revolution repugnant because it was a revolution, and because of its ideals. He adhered to the principle that it is better for injustices to remain than to be removed in unjust ways; but it was not just the ‘atrocities committed by a brutalized nation drunk with victory’ which he abhorred, or a ‘frenzied partisanship’ even worse than it had been in the English Revolution. It was also the incompetence and disorder associated with this as any other revolution: ‘I hate all bungling like poison, but especially in affairs of state’;

When they stab the tyrant to death
Much is till to be lost. They begrudged Caesar the realm
And didn’t know how to rule it.

Disorder was deadly to everything Goethe held dear: ‘Frenchdom in these days of confusion, as formerly Lutherdom, ‘Inhibits the calm cultivation of minds’; every revolution ‘turns towards the states of nature. Beghards, Anabaptists, Sansculottes’; every one starts with the modest aim to remove various abuses, but there is none which does not end in extremes.
He regarded revolutions as futile; not only does ‘no one have the faintest notion of anything better or even different ‘that is to result from them, they always destroy as much good as they produce; as for the supposed principal beneficiaries, The People, they fare worse than the rest:

France’s sad fate, the great ones may bear it in mind;
But indeed, little ones should so so still more.
Great ones suffered destructions: yet who saves the crowd
From the crowd? Here were the people the people’s oppressor.

And it is the great ones whom Goethe held in the end responsible for revolutionary, by failing to meet the demands of their station and destroying the foundations of their rule, by resisting necessary changes or by toying themselves with democratic notions:

Why then, as with a broom, 
Is such a king swept out?
Had they been real kings?
They would still stand intact.

To be popular a great sovereign only requires his greatness; no great revolution is the fault of the people; those who engage in violent overthrow and those who give cause to it are both hateful.

In the case of the 1789 revolution he noticed that ‘a certain taste for liberty had spread amongst the high ranks of society’. Years before he had already been disquieted by the Affair of the Diamond Necklace in which Marie Antoinette was implicated: it undermined the foundations of the state, destroyed the queen’s dignity, weakened the respect for royalty and aristocracy. In 1791 he wrote a comedy,(Der Großkophta) based on this affair in which criminality and occultist credulity play equal roles; yet in 1830 it was again ‘the madness of the French court’ which had released the demon of revolution. He dealt more profoundly with the pre-revolutionary state in the drama Die natürliche Tochter of 1803 (work of very classical form, therefore much neglected). Set in an imaginary country, the king’s weakness opens the way to ambitious nobles who do not shrink from trickery and crime; here is some dialogue from Act I, Scene 6:

The monarch’s mildness
Should in turn cause mildness.
The monarch’s mildness
causes insolence.

How noble has not nature 
fashioned him!

But elevated to too high a 
place. 

Has furnished him with so 
much virtue.

For private domesticity, not 
government



The emperor in Faust II was also intended as a prince with ‘all conceivable attributes for losing his empire’ and in the very epos Reineke Fuchs of 1794 Reynard, the cunning courtier, can literally get away with murder because of the king’s weakness and greed.

And Goethe did acknowledge ‘beneficial consequences which at that time could not yet be perceived’; from the French Revolution; thus it caused French poetry to move away from pedantry. But these were specific benefits and not the great notions under whose banner the revolutionists had marched, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and The Rights of Man.
‘That man alone deserves his freedom and his life. Who has to win then every day anew’ -the author of these often-quoted lines from Faust II could be no believer in rights which everyone has, come what may. ‘Freedom! A lovely word if one could understand it right’—though it is the hero’s adversary in Egmonst (act IV) who speaks these words, they well express Goethe’s reserve. Any mindless praise was repulsive to him, therefore also any mindless praise of liberty: 



To me all apostles of freedom
Have every been odious;
Each sought to be despot himself
In the End


In fact there can be no form of government in which freedom and servitude do not exist together as two poles. 
 As for people’s preoccupation with liberty he noticed that it is a peacetime phenomenon: those who in war patiently bear oppression by friend and foe alike, find the smallest infringement intolerable afterwards, when ‘the more free one is, the more free one demands to be…’ This spirit or aspiration was then (in the early 1770s) showing itself everywhere; just because only a few were pressed one wished to free them as well from accidental pressure; thus arose a certain moral aggressiveness and the meddling of individuals with authority. 
 Some time later came the cry for the freedom of the printing press. It found no supporter in Goethe. When the abolition of censorship was debated in the Weimar government he was one of two who voted against. For in his view ‘only those call for press freedom who want to abuse it’ though they will not scruple to violate it themselves when it suits their books. The enthusiasm for the cause he treated with irony: 


Sweet freedom of the press!

The end of our woe;

It goes round all the trade fairs

In dulci jubilo. 

So let us now print freely
Forever without fuss.

Though no one is to grumble 
Who does not think like us. 
Since literary men have a vested interest he thought it not surprising that they ‘sing passionate hymns in honor of press freedom’, even though it is not literature’s advantage considering that ‘every direct opposition becomes dull in the end’, and censorship enforces wit and ingenuity.

Goethe was adverse to other liberalizing measures also. Thus he opposed making divorce easier —and though he admired the Jews for their steadfastness and their contributions to art and science he was not at all in favor of the 1823 Weimar decree legalising intermarriage of Jews and Christians. As regards law and jurisdictions he criticised even then the practice of excusing offenders and denying their responsibility: ‘A judge who cannot punish ever,/Will join at last the criminal’ (Faust II); ‘when society renounces the right to impose the death-sentence, self-help will at once step forth’. In short, though Goethe detested tyranny he was no friend of libertarianism and humanitarianism, and he recognized that a government cannot succeed with excessive kindness, gentleness and moral delicacy, since it is a mixed and sometimes iniquitous world which has to be dealt with and held in check, and that it must also beware of ‘raising the demands of individuals so that in the end, with all the desires, it no longer knows which ones to satisfy’.

The question of liberty is quite simple: ‘if a man has sufficient freedom to live wholesomely and go about his business, he has enough, and so much everyone has easily. And then we are free only under certain conditions which we must satisfy’. ‘Freedom is a glorious jewel, more glorious than any. Yet in truth, as we see, it does not suit us all’ (Nachlaß). The most important prerequisite is familiar: man to be free must rule himself; consequently the best government is that ‘which teaches us to govern ourselves,’ though as it is: 



They all want to be masters
And no one masters himself. 

The same holds for intellectual life:
All that liberates the mind without
Giving us command of ourselves in pernicious

And goes together with the ancient truth that liberty demands law,
not only in the state but everywhere:
One can be truly free, 
Yet not be unrestrained.

Liberty is joined by equality in the revolutionary pantheon. Goethe, however, thought that legislators and revolutionists who promise equality and liberty together are fantasists or charlatans; it is true, as cowpox is used to counteract smallpox, so diseases in the body politic may be fought by timely vaccination with constitutions; but the common good does not come from forms of government but from each individual’s ‘wise restraint and modest activity within his circle’; though we are democrats in our youth ‘when we possess nothing and fail to value quiet ownership’, men in the mass are only ‘united by prejudices nd excited by passions’, do not hesitate to install a tyrant when in difficulties, and are hostile to excellence:



Just have dealings with the crowd!
Once the people have decided 

Wellington and Aristides

Will be speedily put out.

Reason, in other words, was for Goethe the preserve of the few; for the majority is indolent, so one should take one’s stand always with the minority.

It is then no surprise that he was no friend of public opinion either; ‘the public, especially the German public, is a mad caricature of the demos. It really fancies itself to form some kind of tribunal or senate which casts a vote away from life and literature what it does not like’; it ‘deifies men and blasphemes gods, often praises the faults which make us blush and derides the virtues of which we are proud’; the best is to ignore it. Goethe in fact was convinced of the irreconcilable antagonism of the German public and himself: ‘they do not like me! That feeble word; I do not like them either!’ (To J.D. Falk). He had some good things to say of his compatriots, and also that comparing them with other nations ‘arouses painful feelings’; if only one could ‘impart to the Germans, after the model of the English, less philosophy and more energy, less theory and more practice’, and also a greater sense of humor. 
 As the last remarks suggest, Goethe remained unaffected also by that other great legacy of the French Revolution: nationalism. ‘The worse the country, the better the patriots’ he had found, and he was without sympathy for countrymen’s national aspirations:



‘To become a nation, Germans, you hope it in vain;
Instead all the more freely
Form yourselves into men’. 



Deutscher Nationalcharakter (1796)

An easing of the barriers between the German principalities and their common and against external foes are desirable, but not their merger into one political entity; and as the comparison with France well shows, a country with many small centers and traditions is more favorable to popular culture than a unified state with one capital. Other countries striving for autonomy left him equally cold; unlike so many educated people in Europe he regarded the Greeks’ struggle for independence with some skepticism and scoffed at the public’s indignation when some Britons and Austrians were found to fight on the Turkish side, as if there had not always been mercenaries in history. 
For such aloofness he was criticised, but this was nothing compared to the calumny heaped upon him because he lacked zeal in the German War of Liberation of 1813-15 and disdained to simulate any. He published no manifesto, wrote no stirring poem: ‘my nature is unwarlike’, he said, nor was he given to composing war-songs. He also confessed that he could produce no hymns of hate because the French were not hateful to him: ‘how could I, to whom only civilization and barbarism are of any importance, have hated a nation that belongs to the most civilized on earth and to which I am indebted for so much of my own culture?'
 Nor did he abhor Napoleon; on the contrary, he had met him in 1807 and openly held him in great respect. There were others, not least in Britain, who also spoke well of the emperor, but only, but only because he was the enemy of their country, whose customs and institutions they resented. That was not Goethe’s case; he stood with his prince who stood with the Prussians against the French; he did not justify any of Napoleon’s deeds, but he saw in him an extraordinary man who acted on the political world like a force of nature and had two admirable characteristics; disdain of intellectualism—for ‘power should act and not talk’ —and being master of every situation, always decisive in victory or defeat.

So Goethe was suspected of being a power-worshipper, and this fitted in well with another reproach common already in his own time, that he was a slave of princes (Fürstenknecht). He knew of this reputation, and it also provoked his irony:

His understanding has been brave, 
His will though better could be; 
Why must he bow as princes’ slave?
It’s our slave he should be. 

The people who made the accusation were those who dislike princes on principle. And those in whose opinion a genius had to be a rebel against established authority, whereas Goethe was always on good terms with it.
He had come to Weimar in 1775 at the age of twenty-six and remained there ever after; in time he was ennobled and became minister of state and privy councillor, Karl August, the Duke, later Grand Duke, of Saxe-Weimar, was only eighteen when he arrived and became his friend. The two men were on Christian-name terms, and although Goethe soon began to be more formal he always remained for the Duke alter Kerl (old chap). Karl August’s death in 1828 was a great blow to Goethe even though they had their disagreements; for he loved him as a man and admired him as a ruler.

They call me a princes’ slave.

As if that meant anything!
Do 
I perhaps serve a tyrant or a 
despot?…
If perforce I must be a princes’ slave
it is at all events a consolation
to me that I am only the slave of one
who is himself the slave of the common good. 



But there was, of course, more involved than this personal relationship; Goethe was not forgiven either for treating princes with due deference; he should have been more like Beethoven. The latter in 1812 reported to a correspondent (Bettina von Arnim) from Teplitz, the Bohemian spa, that he and Goethe on their way home had met with the Austrian Imperial family. He, with his hat pressed firmly on his head, had walked right through them, while Goethe stood aside, uncovered himself and bowed. Beethoven was critical of Goethe’s conduct and proud of his own; he thought traditional forms unbecoming to a genius who is worth so much more than a mere prince. Goethe, on the other hand, failed to see that he degraded himself by observing them. He, too, referred to that meeting in a letter: ‘Beethoven I have met in Teplitz. His talen has amazed me; but unfortunately he is a completely untamed personage who, though not at all wrong when he finds the world detestable, does not hereby make it more enjoyable to himself or others’. 

And Goethe could well distinguish between a man as a person and as a prince. ‘Here you have a monarch’, he said of Ludwig I of Bavaria, ‘who apart from his royal majesty has preserved his inborn pleasant nature. This is a rare phenomenon’. His remarks on princes in general were, in fact, quite critical:

‘at the time when there were still kings there were also still gods’;
the great and powerful are ‘awkward to deal with’. 


Who grows old with princes

Learns much, learns 
To let pass much in silence’.


Elpenor I,2



But no matter; short of changing his character and becoming a rebel or radical he remained a princes’ slave to his antagonists.

In the whole of Goethe’s works, letters and conversations, remarks which touched on politics are incidental and comparatively infrequent. Yet they all exhibit the same spirit. Many are more topical now than in Goethe’s own time when the age of the common man had hardly begun and its foibles were still in their infancy. Reading them is to breathe fresh air. Although concerned with the same things that concern us now, they are free from the customary pieties; there is humbug, presence or false sentiment, no waxing enthusiastic or indignant, nor any posing as a scientific mind that analyses, unveils and disillusions. Instead there is a sagacious realism, expressed calmly or mordantly as the case may be, and a great-self-assurance without any trace of hubris or conceit. As Goethe did not only write master-works, so he was not always right, as he himself well knew. But this is unimportant; we need not agree with all he said in order to see that in many respects his attitude to life and politics can serve as a model for any true conservative. 



Rolf Gruner was a lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield