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. ***** 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 Faust 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.