Goethe, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein on Truth and Deception

Joseph P. Lawrence

Abstract I focus my remarks on Goethe and Dostoevsky, because both of these writers have carried out a profound reflection on the nature of truth and deception. At the same time, both have been misunderstood in much the same way: as if they were prophets of Nietzsche’s infamous suggestion that, for human beings, lies are much more essential than the truth. What I suggest in contrast is that both Goethe and Dostoevsky took truth very seriously indeed. As a result they are to be understood less in conjunction with Nietzsche than with Aristotle, who suggested that poetry can more effectively communicate truth than history. What inspired both Dostoevsky and Goethe was the need to tell the truth—and above all the truth about deception. To set up the discussion I begin with a short observation about a woefully misunderstood conception of Wittgenstein: to depict the world as the sum total of facts is not to favour scientific discourse over poetry. For the truth about the world is secondary. It is the truth about life in the world that most matters to us.

Key Words: Truth, deception, art, poetry, Goethe, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein.

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1. What Truth Matters? A Note on Wittgenstein In discussing ‘Tales of Deception’ most of us have tended to assume that truth is a matter of correctly narrating the facts—and that deception constitutes above all a misrepresentation of the facts. It is my intention to question this model. I am, of course, as concerned about getting the facts right as anyone else. But I do not believe that this is the way to the truth that really matters. To illustrate what I have in mind, let me begin with a short remark about the way Wittgenstein has commonly been misunderstood, or what I am inclined to call the positivist misappropriation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.1 What is at issue in the misunderstanding is the nature of the world itself. Very many of Wittgenstein’s followers seem to believe that the preliminary definition that he gives in his very first proposition ‘The world is all that is the case,’ is decisive for the whole work. The world, then, is simply the sum total of facts. It is a ‘sum total’ that in fact is never given, since the world is gone once death brings it to an end, but in the meantime the process of addition can be carried out well enough. Mystics may attempt to experience the world as a whole, but in fact it never really will be a whole. All of this is well and good and serves as an accurate enough description of the scientific project—the attempt to get the facts right, presumably so they can be

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access 14 Goethe, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein on Truth and Deception ______delivered over to Google for storage and quick retrieval. The battle now to fight out is whether correct information or deceptive misinformation will prevail. What this account leaves out is stated clearly in proposition 6.43: ‘The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.’ If one were to judge this in the light of his preliminary statement, one would presumably have to add the remark that we are now talking about something purely subjective. In other words, given that totality of facts will never be established, what separates the perceived world of the happy person from the perceived world of the unhappy person must simply rest upon the fact that they find themselves at different stages in their individual attempts to ‘add up’ the facts. But there is clearly more to it. The subjective world is the only world that any of us will encounter as the truly knowable world. In other words, given the fact that the addition will never be completed, it turns out that the idea of all that is the case is itself the fiction. The subjective worlds come apart, moreover, quite independently of where we happen to find ourselves in whatever inventory we might be making of the ‘facts.’ The proof of this can be established quickly enough. Were we to interview two men who were both intelligent and highly educated, they would quickly establish a great deal of consensus with regard to the facts, regardless of the fact that one of them is happy while the other one is severely depressed. The happy man will be well aware of the facts about what happened to the Armenians in the First World War and to the Jews in the Second World War. The depressed man will be well aware of the world of fine wines and good music. He will know that there are people who take their families on spectacular vacations in the mountains or on the sea. This result is interesting. Both acknowledge pretty much the same set of facts. Yet one man finds himself in heaven while the other man finds himself in hell. What this means, quite simply, is that while science tells the truth about the world, we will have to turn somewhere else for an account of the truth that really matters. And the truth that really matters is very clearly the truth that separates heaven and hell. What is at issue is nothing short of our salvation.

2. Goethe’s When I first envisioned this chapter, I assumed that it would be quite enough to talk about Dostoevsky’s great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. What made me expand it to include remarks about Wittgenstein and Goethe was what I observed during the course of our discussions. As I already recounted, it seemed to me that, in talking about truth and deception, most of us tend to assume that what is at issue is whether we get the facts right or wilfully distort them. I hope already to have made clear just why I regard this as a secondary concern: the truth about whatever happens to be the case sheds no light on the truth that matters most intimately to

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access Joseph P. Lawrence 15 ______each of us, the truth, that is, about whether we experience life as heaven or hell—or as a flattened-out in-between. To address this issue, poets use the language of myth: human beings find themselves stretched out over the divide that separates the highest heaven from the deepest pit. From the point of view of science and rational philosophy, poets can be discounted for this very reason—that they let themselves get carried away by their imagination. As Plato, put it: poets like to lie. Plato not only said this explicitly, but he drew the necessary conclusion: poets (particularly tragic poets) should be banished from any ideal state. Over two thousand years later, Nietzsche drew the opposite conclusion (he thought that poets are necessary to life), but on the basis of the same assumption, that is, he too thought that poets lie. In the face of that, though, his emphatic statement: ‘Art is worth more than truth.’2 Nietzsche’s recommendation for humanity is that, in the face of the hellishness of real truth, we should take shelter in myth. Understanding the mythical nature of the truths of science and everyday life is what sets a superman apart from common humanity. In other words, the superman knows how to lie and does so unashamedly. Goethe is often regarded as the precursor of Nietzsche on precisely these matters. Life we have only ‘am farbigen Abglanz,’ that is, ‘in many-hued reflection.’3 In other words, whereas gazing at the sun would blind us, the illusion of the rainbow gives us hope. The world is a hell we must either try to escape—or live in and accept on the basis of the lies we tell. In a common rendition, Faust as a character is the forerunner of Nietzsche’s superman. Goethe’s actual view, however, I find both deeper and truer than the view put forth by Nietzsche. Even so, I can hardly disagree that Goethe operates very much in the sphere of the mythical. One of the things that makes it possible to align Faust with Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov is that the figure of the devil, clearly mythical, plays a central role in both works. In Faust he bears the name of Mephistopheles. He can be regarded as a symbol, of course, for Faust’s own infatuation with power. On the other hand, he represents something essential that is transcendent in the sense that it extends far beyond the peculiar character of Faust himself. An embodiment of the will to power, Faust embodies even more emphatically what makes us seek power in the first place: the intuition that the world is a hellish place and very much needs restructuring. Mephistopheles is the spirit that keeps reminding us of just this. If he is the will to negation, it is for a good reason. In his words (taken from the Prologue where he is depicted as speaking directly to God), ‘Man moves me to compassion, so wretched is his plight’ (297). We seek to extend our power over the world for the simple reason that in God’s version it is unbearable. What Faust symbolizes is the fact that for archaic wilderness we have substituted a technological civilization. Who doubts that, as much as simple greed may be what we are really after, our justification for extending power is always the same: our compassion. Even hydrogen bombs were developed under the slogan

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access 16 Goethe, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein on Truth and Deception ______‘Atoms for Peace,’ the development of nuclear power plants for the sake of providing cities with a cheap source of electricity. Against this background, let me now proceed to the heart of the matter, by considering a little understood scene in Faust, Part One, a playful allusion to Shakespeare called ‘The Walpurgis Night’s Dream.’ It occurs at the end of the famous Walpurgis Night scene, which in our context can be regarded as Faust’s quick preview of hell. On the face of it, it appears that Goethe is making the point Nietzsche later makes: art (the dream) is a response to too deep a look into the hellish core of reality. In other words, it is the beautiful illusion that we need to hold on to in order to maintain our commitment to life. In any event, here’s the story. Even those who have only a superficial knowledge of the work are likely to recall that on the eve of , in other words, on Walpurgis Night, Mephistopheles takes Faust to Mountain, where witches and warlocks are gathering for dark and even explicitly Satanic rites. To get up the mountain, given that the night is dark, they entrust themselves to a will-o’-the-wisp, a flare of swamp gas (what we could call the illusion of light), which dances erratically and is famous for getting people killed by luring them into swamps at night, where their feet get stuck in quicksand and they die horrific deaths. In other words, they entrust themselves to a strange guide into a strange world. Given the bizarre nature of the ghosts and fairies, and of the witches and warlocks themselves, one could easily enough say that this is a world of pure fantasy and illusion. No wonder the scene takes place at night, for here we really find ourselves in a fantastical dream. But all is not a dream. This becomes clear towards the top of the mountain. Faust wants to go all of the way up. He wants to see naked witches engaging in bestial acts with a goat, the stand in for Satan. What he seeks to understand is the full horror of desire released. He wants to see the naked truth of reality, regardless of how hellish it might be. Quite apropos, of course, for a man who, for the sake of esoteric knowledge, has sold his soul to the devil. Mephistopheles cautions Faust not to go so far, to pause instead on a high mountain valley, where instead of seeing Satan, he himself can enjoy a dance with a nubile and delightfully naked young witch. Faust is not ready to see into the heart of evil. The arrangement seems to work well. Faust enjoys the dance—or at least until a red mouse pops out of the witch’s mouth. This dismays him enough that he drops back and simply stares. At that point, he has a prophetic vision into the horrific truth that awaits him by the end Part One of Faust. In the face of one of the witches, he suddenly recognizes Gretchen, the young woman he has recently seduced and (unbeknownst to him) made pregnant. The vision is too horrible to bear: what first appears as a red necklace about her neck turns out to be blood. What he has seen into is the awful truth of how her life will end—with a beheading. It is at this point that Mephistopheles, the master of

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access Joseph P. Lawrence 17 ______deception, comes to his rescue by ushering him over a small hill and into another open valley, where, of all things, a play is about to be staged. This is the Walpurgis Night’s Dream, which bears the revealing subtitle: ‘The Golden Anniversary of Oberon and Titania.’ A play within a play, it is also a dream within a dream. Its reality is, moreover, the stuff of pure fiction. Modelled on the mock play in Shakespeare’s Night’s Dream, it features the old Shakespearian characters, Puck and Ariel, Oberon and Titania. By all appearances, we have left the field of truth far behind, taking shelter from Faust’s horrific vision by the diversion of a play, quite as if Goethe wanted loudly to proclaim that art and poetry are simply meant to entertain us, to take our mind off of the harshness of reality. Sweet deception, escape from life—what else is literature? What else, indeed, if not revelation of truth. And so we find it. The Walpurgis Night’s Dream is more truth than Walpurgis Night. This remains the case even if there might be truth in the Walpurgis Night suggestion that hell lies at the bottom of everything we see. How, after all, could one possibly deny that this is true for Gretchen herself? Hers is unambiguously a tragedy—as are so many of the lives of human beings around us. How does Goethe tell us, in the context of a dream play, that there is more to truth? First, by dispensing with a stage: ‘Misty vale and hoary hill, / That’s our scenery’ (4225-26). Against Nietzsche’s understanding that places culture in the realm of artefact and deception, Goethe views culture itself as a gift of nature. This is why the actors in the ‘Dream’ dismiss convention (e.g. the celebration of a wedding anniversary) in order to highlight the primacy of simple truth. Thus the remark: ‘To make a golden wedding day / Takes fifty years to the letter; / But when their quarrels pass away, / That gold I like much better’ (4227-4230). The truth of The Walpurgis Night is the hell of constant quarrel. The truth of the Dream is that truth—but also its resolution. It is the truth of nature itself. First the darkness-enclosed seed—and then the blossoming plant. It is Nature that accomplishes everything. Buzzing bees and mosquitoes, frogs and crickets, join together, for instance, to constitute the orchestra. There is nothing ‘artificial’ or ‘deceptive’ about art here, for the art is the art of nature. And, from the perspective of nature, the hell ‘at the bottom’ has neither less nor more claim to being ultimate than the sky over our heads and the earth under our feet. The ‘truth’ that emerges only in the playful dream is the truth of the actual status of tragedy itself. It is a truth spoken by a weathervane. When the wind blows one way, he chants with real authority: ‘The exquisite company! Each girl should be a bride; The bachelors, grooms; for one can see how well they are allied’ (4295-98). And yet, when the wind blows the other way, he chants with equal authority: ‘The earth should open up and gape, To swallow this young revel, Or I will make a swift escape, To hell to see the Devil’ (4299-4302). Truth enters into the play with deception because truth is always simultaneously the possibility of comedy and the possibility of tragedy. Life is suspended between heaven and hell. This is the meaning of human freedom.

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access 18 Goethe, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein on Truth and Deception ______It is the capacity for the telling of lies that leads to the reign of darkness. But it is equally the capacity for telling the truth which leads ultimately to a world ordered and filled with light. Reconsider, then, what we have so far. Science endeavours to narrate the facts, which are simply what they are—without ambiguity. Art and poetry seek to reveal a deeper truth, the ambiguity of life itself. Faust in despair is Faust who believes that life as such is tragic. The function of the Walpurgis Night’s Dream is not to provide an illusion that offers him refuge from the tragic truth. Instead, it is to remind him of the truth: life is alternatively tragic and comic, depending on ‘which way the wind blows.’ The great temptation of modernity is to try to close the door on tragedy by insisting on the neutral (value-free) facts of the in-between. The problem this leads to, however, is that the world built on this principle (the refusal to let the wind blow where it will) is an increasingly artificial world—and as such a glittering deception. Problems (famine, disease, discomfort) can be held at bay of course, but doing so simply increases their destructive force. As issues like climate change and nuclear armaments remind us, piling up bandages is like building a great dam. When finally it bursts asunder, global disaster can ensue. In this regard, it would certainly have been to our collective advantage to live in the truth.

3. Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov Although my initial intention was to talk only about Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, I will limit myself now to a few general remarks.4 The novel is appealing first of all because it is so well known, secondly because it so well illustrates the dialectic of heaven and hell that I have in mind, and thirdly because it shows so wonderfully how the ‘truth that matters’ is the truth of subjective appearance. After all, here everything is deception. Of the brothers, the one ‘obviously’ guilty of the murder of his father is in fact innocent. The atheist is the master of Christian compassion. In contrast, institutionalized (as is shown so compellingly in the story of the ‘The Grand Inquisitor’) leads to the denial of Christ. Whereas Christ renounced the devil’s temptation to feed everyone by turning bread to stone, we fertilize our fields in the belief that we thereby complete our Christian duty. Whereas Christ resisted the temptation to bring peace to the world by serving as its king, we celebrate any move we can make in the direction of universal law and world government. In a word, Dostoevsky’s art is to disclose a world in which everything is turned upside down. Nothing is what it appears to be—and yet the only world that matters to anyone is the world of just that appearance. What this means is that storytelling is the proper vehicle of transmitting the only truth that matters. At the same time, the human capacity for storytelling is what makes possible the conviction of an innocent man—and all of the general hypocrisy that makes life so deeply problematic. Literature, in other words, is caught in the snare of the very ambiguity that it so masterfully discloses. It shows

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access Joseph P. Lawrence 19 ______us what it means to stand always at the crossroads of comedy and tragedy. At the same time, the poetic impulse, the impulse to tell stories, is precisely what binds us ever tighter into a web of lies. The novelist in any of us makes us privy to gossip. It is what lures us into finding the ‘truth’ behind appearance, even when the truth is no more than a suspicion and its telling the spreading of malicious slanders. Dostoevsky, the novelist, the seeker of truth, knows the truth that novels are always precisely as much about deception as they are about truth. Instead of pretending that there might be something like a system of truth that will free us forever from deception, what we need to do above all else is to understand just why truth itself is bound to deception and how it is that the twofold of truth and deception operates. Great literature has always been up to precisely this task.

Notes

1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961). 2 , The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), Aphorism 853. 3 Goethe’s Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1961), line 4727. I will incorporate subsequent line numbers in the text. 4 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Bibliography

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by Richard Pevear and Latissa Volokhonsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.

Goethe’s Faust. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1961.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books, 1968.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

Joseph P. Lawrence is Professor of Philosophy at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. He is the author of Schellings Philosophie des ewigen

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access 20 Goethe, Dostoevsky and Wittgenstein on Truth and Deception ______

Anfangs (Würzburg: 1989) and Socrates among Strangers (Northwestern University Press: 2015). In addition to numerous articles on German philosophy, he has written on literary figures such as Shakespeare, Goethe, and Hermann Broch.

Joseph P. Lawrence - 9781848883543 Downloaded from Brill.com09/25/2021 12:51:14PM via free access