Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight

Abstract

Reviewed by: Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy ed. by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight Tanvi Solanki Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and Philosophy. Edited by Sarah Vandegrift Eldridge and C. Allen Speight. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 296. Paper $39.81. ISBN 978-0190859251. Philosophical approaches to Goethe's oeuvre generally do not include Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, but rather Goethe's morphology, theory of colors, or explicit literary engagements with philosophers such as Spinoza. Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a novel of formation or a Bildungsroman, tells of a young man from a well-off merchant family, who rebels against his father and flees his home to join precarious traveling theater troupes, falls in love and has several affairs, and eventually is somewhat socialized into bourgeois society. It is unusual to suggest that it is a philosophical novel or philosophy as such. As of 2021, the collaborative "Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts" treats Goethe as a philosopher rather than a poet, dramatist, or novelist and selects terms treated as philosophical rather than poetic concepts, most of which do not concern Wilhelm Meister specifically. Eldridge and Speight's timely volume can thus be situated as a valuable contribution to recent debates about how Goethe's literary works can be approached philosophically. The editors seek to explore what the particularities of a work of literature can tell us about universal and fundamental questions about life such as gender and sexuality, contingency, and authority. Rather than limiting their aim to argue for the novel to be included within the Western philosophical canon, the editors seek to redefine what would and would not count as a philosophical question, and how such questions could be best addressed in the open-ended, all-inclusive genre of the novel. While this might be new to some contemporary philosophers, especially those hailing from the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy, it is still worth emphasizing, though it was already an inspiration for Friedrich Schlegel's 1799 philosophical novel Lucinde. For anyone reading, writing about, and teaching Wilhelm Meister in the current political climate, the question concerning the protagonist Wilhelm's identity is unavoidable. It is no longer possible to treat as unmarked and normative that the central figure of Goethe's hugely influential Bildungsroman hails from a wealthy [End Page 155] family and is a white, heterosexual, European male who has the privilege to opt to lead a wayward life of an artist who earns little or no money, though he has the option to follow his father's profession as a businessman. While the editors acknowledge Wilhelm's privileged identity, they argue that the novel nonetheless has relevance today and raises important questions with which all can engage. One strength of the volume is its inclusion of a collection of high-quality essays representing methodologically diverse ways of thinking about the novel's relevance for broader, universally accessible issues that are not limited to the time, place, class, and other particularities of Wilhelm. This aligns with Goethe's own view that individuals are dynamically shaped by ever-changing historical circumstances. It would be helpful if the authors made clear in their otherwise excellent introduction the principle in the organization of the articles. There were also some mentions of Wilhelm Meister as a harbinger of modernity, but the term modernity itself was left relatively vague. It would be productive to question the assumptions of "modernity," a term that is so often thrown around without critical definition or re-definition, and to further probe whether the universal topics the volume seeks to address are, indeed, universal. The volume begins with Eckart Förster's essay, skillfully translated by Eldridge and Speight, which discusses Goethe as a philosopher, particularly through his studies of nature. The second chapter by Speight argues for a revisability throughout the novel, lending it a kind of openness for philosophical speculation. The third essay by Eldridge, impressive in its skillful, detailed analysis of many episodes in the novel and philologically tight comparisons to the novel's early draft, the Theatralische Sendung, shows how the novel can teach us about using narrative direction to manage contingency in life. Elizabeth...