Apprentice, Journeyman, Master...
Art is long, life is short, judgment difficult, opportunities fleeting.-Goethe
Everyone of my writings have been furnished to me by a thousand different persons, a thousand different things,—the learned and the ignorant, the wise and the foolish, infacy and age have come in turn, generally without having the least suspicion of it, to bring me the offering of their thoughts, their faculties, their experiences; often they have sowed the harvest I have reaped; my work is that of an aggregation of being taken from the whole of nature; it bears the name of Goethe.
—Goethe
Drunk and stumbling home from a late-night party in Rome, Goethe and his artistic friends were in a bit of a bind. On their way home, a conversation about whether or not Michelangelo or Raphael was the greatest artist had broken out. They were unable to come up with a definitive answer although the debate had raged from the late hours of the party to the bank of the waterway they had just crossed. Now their various homes called for the group to separate but how could they when they had yet to reach a conclusion? They had no choice left but to perform the only sensible option.
They paid the ferryman to return them to the other side of the bank and back so they could continue the conversation. And when that failed to satiate the debaters they once again paid the ferryman for another round-trip. The ferryman’s son observing this madness asked his ferryman father “Why are they doing this father?” The ferryman simply replied “Because they are crazy, my son. They are completely mad.”
This endless bickering over art and culture has been the main point of Goethe’s works. He has had the honor of being called Germany’s Shakespeare but in my mind, he also deserves the honor of being called Germanic Plato. For his ideas not only reach out into poetry and literature but also into geology, biology, botany, light theory, politics, architecture, and on and on. We often quote this exhausting generalizer without realizing we are doing so.
The man known as Goethe was obsessed with the idea that man must find a way to adequately express himself. The poor are doomed to failure because they lose too much in their struggles to stay alive. The manly virtues of stillness and calmness are assaulted by the constant struggle of making ends meet. Though they are innovative and full of vitality their energies are dissipated amongst the mundane and living a life.
The rich have all the resources and culture in the world but suffer from a lack of drive. Their love of pictures and rhymes is temporal and local. Art is merely a checklist that all people of their station are expected to fulfill. Though they have the money to purchase art they lack the character to stare authenticity in its face.
Yet Goethe still expects us to square the circle, to draw blood from the iron bull. He wants the reposed artist with the work ethic of a coal miner. Can you not begin to see how neatly the European hero fits into this man’s ideas? He is Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Carlyle’s Man of Letters, and Fichte’s scholar. He is the Greek philosopher who accepts all foreign culture that comes before him because he takes them to be stimulants and not absolute values.
Jesus is a carpenter and belongs to the people situated in a lovely hamlet at the bottom of a mountain. Adi Shankara and Immanuel Kant reside in philosophical Olympus at the very peak. There is an entire caste system of Vedic literature and acrobatic Germanic-metaphysical feats that separate them from the common man. But there is always the Buddha, a man of both logic and emotion who can meet you where you are. Like a dragon, it is no problem for Buddha to ascend to the top to have breakfast with Kant and meet Jesus at the bottom for lunch.
And it was kind and portly David Hume with his focus on emotional reasoning that awakened Kant from his dogmatic slumber. Our heroes can rise from the bottom like Hume and Fichte or descend from aristocratic peaks like Goethe and Buddha. This is because all the nonsense of—money, wealth, culture, and art are just tools to live a good life. It is this lesson that Willhelm learns in Willhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. True art is learning to live a good life.
The knights who wished to find the Holy Grail did not follow the well-traversed path of the thousands of knights that had preceded them. They choose the darkest parts of the forest where no one had ever trodden before. Thus their apprenticeship began, when they began to work and toil with the plot of land that had been bequeathed to them and no one else. Beyond the path lies the rank of journeyman and eventually—master. It’s all there for the taking. But the forest is big, the nights are dark, and the woods are full of terrors.