Chapter 12 introduces Goethe’s two Wilhelm Meister novels. It problematises the notion of the Bildungsroman which is often assigned to the first novel, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship), and proposes that the two novels exemplify the four modes proposed by Northrop Frye: satire, irony and comedy in the case of the Lehrjahre, and, in the case of the sequel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (Wilhelm Meisters Journeyman Years), romance. The chapter argues that the supposed disjunctions within and between the two novels are in fact part of their unifying principle.

This chapter is a meditation on Goethe’s 1826 poem ‘Im ernsten Beinhaus’ (‘On Contemplating Schiller’s Skull’). The chapter moves from poetic form (Dante’s terza rima), to weaving, to wisdom, to mystery. It emphasises the resonance between Goethe’s reflections here and the use of oracle bones for divination in ancient China, and closes with the famous non-closure of Goethe’s poem.

As noted in Chapter 2, the author of a picaresque novel has at his disposal three possible endings: He may either simply cease writing, “halting the train” of his narrative; have his protagonist withdraw from the world; or modulate from picaresque satire into the tonality of Comedy. Confronted with this choice at the end of the picaresque portion of the Apprenticeship, Goethe allows his protagonist (and reader) to experience vicariously the second of these possible endings in the “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul,” and then pursues the third, a modulation into the Comic mode. Goethe thereby follows the example of many major eighteenth-century novels, including Gil Blas, Tom Jones, Roderick Random, and even Moll Flanders.

Yet to term the final books of the Apprenticeship “Comic” may sound surprising, or even startling. For these books relate several tragic events: It is here that Wilhelm learns of Mariane’s tragic death, watches Mignon die, and experiences the Harper’s suicide after learning the horrible truth of his own history.

The original impetus to the following study was threefold. First, I felt uneasy with a prevailing critical attitude toward Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels: namely, that the Apprenticeship and the Journeyman Years remain ultimately irreconcilable with each other, and disunified and disjointed in themselves. Even though it exhibits outwardly all the features usually associated with a sequel – a parallel title, the reappearance of major characters, similar themes, and a continuous plot – Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years has not been considered a true sequel to the Apprenticeship. The unity of the first and second parts of Faust has long since ceased to be questioned, yet critics who accept the unity of these “most incalculable productions” as established are not prepared to grant the unity of the Apprenticeship and the Journeyman Years, even though the genesis of the latter pair is interrupted by a shorter hiatus than the genesis of Faust.

In a letter to Göttling of January 1929, Goethe compared the novel he was straining to complete to a “Sisyphean boulder” that he hoped soon to push over the summit and roll toward the public. Predictably, Goethe’s readers have for the most part merely scurried out of the way. Interpreters of the Journeyman Years, attempting to roll this great boulder of a novel back uphill to see whence it came, have all too often abandoned the Sisyphean task in utter frustration.

Numerous critics have turned to the Journeyman Years seeking a coherent formal or structural principle only to come away convinced that there is none to be found. In his history of the novel of the Age of Goethe, H. H. Borcherdt has given the Journeyman Years a chapter apart, as an anomaly; Hermann Broch and Ehrhard Bahr have seen the Journeyman Years as an “experimental novel” anticipating modernism’s total break with traditional genre forms.

Although the relationship between the Apprenticeship and the tradition of the picaresque novel has never been studied in depth, numerous critics have nonetheless recognized picaresque elements in the Apprenticeship. Hans Reiss, for example, notes while discussing the characters of Goethe’s novel that “most … do not substantially differ from those of the conventional picaresque novel to which they originally belonged,” and Enright sees picaresque elements of plot besides:

In discussing the Apprenticeship with Eckermann in 1825, Goethe owned that he himself almost lacked the key to that “incalculable production.” It is difficult and perhaps inadvisable, he claimed, to seek such a midpoint, a “decided tendency” which would exist only conceptually. Yet interpreters were and are wont to do just this, and, after pronouncing this caveat, Goethe allowed that one might after all look to the end of the novel:

I have sought in this study to establish the unity of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years upon a foundation of Comic form. The unity of these two novels taken together consists not, however, in mere uniformity: thus, no simple and static notion of Comic form would have been adequate to shed light upon their underlying structure. The interpretive task at hand required a notion of Comic form as dynamic and internally differentiated as the complex narrative it sought to elucidate. Northrop Frye’s subtle morphology of Comic form, in which Comedy as a pregeneric modality is seen as a continuous evolution of structure modulating through Satiric-Ironic, pure Comic, and Romance “tonalities” proves uniquely capable of uncovering the unity within Goethe’s richly diverse narrative.

GOETHE's LOVE OF MYSTERIES is no secret. Many of these arcana have already been explored in depth: we have multiple fine studies on alchemy, Hermeticism, Freemasonry, and phrenology and even an outstanding book by our late colleague Gloria Flaherty on shamanism. Thus, it is surprising how little of the great mountain of Goethe scholarship is devoted to the ultimate Geheimnis (mystery), especially since it is precisely the place where Goethe's two highest ideals, “das Ewig-Weibliche” (the Eternal Feminine) and the Spinozist concept of “Gott-Natur” (God-Nature), intersect. That point is the ancient mystery religions. I cannot begin to do justice to such a vast and complex topic but will attempt here to make at least a token payment on this major debt.

The curious lack of critical attention is all the more surprising given how pervasive the whole theme of mystery religion was within the intellectual life of Goethe's contemporaries. Even scientists thought in such terms, as evidenced by the frontispiece to Alexander von Humboldt's Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen (Ideas for a Geography of Plants, 1807), which he dedicated to Goethe: in Bertel Thorvaldsen's image, Apollo unveils Artemis/ Isis, before whose feet Goethe's scientific treatise Die Metamorphose der Pflanzen (1790) has been laid (fig. 1). When Humboldt wants to pay homage to both Goethe and Nature herself simultaneously, his reflex is to invoke Greek mystery religion.

Hermetic Discourse

This topic is difficult not just because it is huge but also because Goethe's understanding and treatment of it are so genuine: all communications about the Mysteries were to be veiled in enigmas, “sub aenigmate … proferre,” as Pico della Mirandola expressed it. The Mysteries were simultaneously exoteric and esoteric; they all offered not only public displays that were widely known but also secret revelations to small groups of initiates that were so well guarded we can only speculate about their precise nature today. Pico admonished anyone who would discuss the Mysteries to be “editos et non editos”—simultaneously published and unpublished (Wind 11).

ECOLOGY IS AN EMINENTLY practical discipline, but the practical dilemmas of the ecological movement—and arguably of the environmental crisis itself—are the consequences of our failure to comprehend the complexity and unity of nature theoretically. The ecological crisis is first and foremost an epistemological crisis. As Thomas Kuhn has taught us, such crises are potentially revolutionary episodes out of which new paradigms can emerge. We have also learned from Kuhn that paradigm shifts are rarely sudden events; usually they unfold over decades or even centuries. So it has been with the search for a new paradigm that was inaugurated by Goethe's scientific work. As a practicing scientist and as a philosopher of science, Goethe both foresaw the crisis of mechanistic explanation and laid foundations for a new paradigm that might replace it. In doing so, he also laid foundations for a future, alternative science of ecology. Although the term “ecology” did not exist until Ernst Haeckel coined it in 1866, Goethe was a profound ecologist in principle and practice if not yet in name. This essay on four major “Goethean ecologists” seeks to add a brief chapter to the history of the reception of Goethe's scientific work and also to Donald Worster's now standard history of ecology, which barely mentions Goethe in passing.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mechanists seemed to have triumphed over both Naturphilosophie and the separate, more narrowly Kantian school described by Timothy Lenoir, which sought in vain to keep alive a sophisticated mode of teleological explanation. The unsophisticated teleology invoked by Darwin's critics was easily routed, and various modes of vitalism were pushed to the margins by the many patent successes of the mechanistic model. Materialism was pursued with religious fervor and supreme confidence: major biologists actually swore mutual oaths to the true faith, and talented students were counseled to avoid physics, because soon no unsolved problems would remain. But the great revolutions in early twentieth-century physics that the mechanists never saw coming doomed the project: nineteenth-century materialism was toppled because relativity and quantum mechanics undermined its deepest foundations.

The Enlightenment took enormous interest in a wide variety of religious topics: the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of revelation, ecclesiastical authority, the status of scripture, religious tolerance, and immortality. This last issue is particularly important as one of the essential components, along with the existence of a moral God, of a “natural” theology that could be fully derived or endorsed by reason. Furthermore, reflection on immortality plays directly into the urgent discussions in the eighteenth century about autonomy, freedom, and progress; the way one envisions a hereafter profoundly reflects and legitimates the way one envisions life in the present. This fluidity between an understanding of the here and the hereafter is perfectly captured in Johann Joachim Spalding's extremely influential Bestimmung des Menschen (1748; The Vocation of Man), which envisions immortality as a process of ever increasing rational pleasure and self-perfection—goals not at all unfamiliar to the mortals of the Enlightenment.

Johann Gottfried Herder is a central and in some ways transitional voice in this public discussion of man's immortal Bestimmung. In the early 1769 letters to Mendelssohn he espoused a model of nonprogressive palingenesis, in which the soul is endlessly reborn within the same class of being without undergoing any overarching development. There is, in short, no personal, angelic afterlife. Compared to the essentially Christian afterlife of the rationalist Popularphilosophen of Herder's day, this position was quite austere.