Alexis de Tocqueville: Memoir on Pauperism and Other Writings: Poverty, Public Welfare, and Inequality. Christine Dunn Henderson translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021.

 

Note: A version of this review appeared in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 47, Number 3, Summer 2021.

 

Tocqueville published his two “mémoires” or memos on pauperism in 1833 and 1837, respectively—that is, almost as bookends to the first volume of Democracy in America. In them, he considers his great theme, the advance of “democracy” or “equality of conditions” and its counterpoint, the rise of a new aristocracy founded on that very social egalitarianism, an “aristocracy” or oligarchy of industrial magnates who aim at lording it over factory workers in the cities Whereas the feudal lords of the European countryside had ruled ‘their’ peasants with a firm but often kindly hand, living with them on the same land, knowing them personally, the modern aristocrat live apart from their employees, do not know them, and think of them only as replaceable parts in factories organized rather like the machines on the shop floor.

“This leads to “a most extraordinary and apparently inexplicable sight”: “the countries that appear the poorest are those which, in reality, contain the fewest indigents, while among the peoples whose opulence you admire, one part of the population is obliged to rely upon the gift of the other in order to live” (Memoir on Pauperism, 1). England’s prosperous countryside contrasts with its villages, where one-sixth of the people live on “public charity”; in Spain and Portugal, the countryside is impoverished but few are indigent; in France, conditions vary from province to province. Even within the same empire, “you will see proportionate growth of, on the one hand, the number of those living in comfort, and on the other hand, the number of those who fall back upon public donations in order to live” (MP, 2).

Tocqueville is nothing if not an ardent inquirer into social causation. One of the surprises an early reader of the Democracy must have experienced was his reversal of the characteristic Enlightenment narrative. Voltaire and his allies ascribed feudalism and it abuses to Christianity; French Revolutionaries notoriously had replaced the Madonna and her Child with the Goddess of Reason. Unearthing the origin of equality, Tocqueville finds its root in the Christianity the revolutionaries loathed. To understand pauperism in the mist of plenty, Tocqueville goes even farther back, to the origin of human society itself.

“Behold men gathering for the first time. They come out of the forests, they are still wild, they join forces not to enjoy life, but to find the means of surviving. Shelter against the intemperance of the seasons, sufficient food—such is the object of their efforts. Their minds do not go beyond these goods, and if they obtain them without trouble, they judge themselves satisfied with their fate and doze in idle comfort,” just as “the barbarous tribes in North America” Tocqueville had visited still did. Men in the earliest societies were social animals, “with very few desires” and “hardly any needs other than” those felt by the animals among which they lived. The supported themselves by hunting; property ownership occurred only after they became “acquainted with agriculture” (MP, 3).

Now “assured of survival, they begin to glimpse that human existence offers other sources of pleasures beyond the satisfaction of life’s first and most urgent needs” (MP, 3). Inequality arose—millennia before Christianity. “One sees the spirit of conquest, which has been the mother of all aristocratic societies, spread,” based as it is on the few who possess the bodily strength and psychic ferocity to kill and to risk being killed for the sake of rule over others and the consequent seizure of their property (MP, 5).

Such men rivaled each other, attempted to conquer each other. “The barbarians who invaded the Roman Empire at the end of the fourth century were savages who had glimpsed landed property’s utility and had wanted to get its advantages for themselves.” Having softened their moeurs after their own vast conquests, now accustomed to “the peaceful activities of field labor” but without that level of “civilization” that would have made them “capable of fighting against the primitive fierceness of their enemies,” Roman farmers became tenants of the new, rough aristocrats; “feudal society was organized and the Middle Ages were born.” “Inequality passed into laws, and from having been a fact, it became a right.” (MP, 5).

Tocqueville “generalizes” from these facts. “If we pay attention to what has happened since the birth of societies, we will easily discover that equality is only found at the two ends of society. Savages are equal because they are all equally weak and ignorant. Very civilized men are able to all become equal because they all have similar means of attaining comfort and happiness at their disposal Between these two extremes, the inequality of conditions is found: the wealth, enlightenment, and power of some and the poverty, ignorance, and weakness of all the others” (MP, 5). Under feudal social conditions, no “Third Estate” or middle class existed, only “those who cultivated the soil without possessing it” and “those who possessed the soil without cultivating it” (MP, 6).

Feudal peasants were ruled by the aristocrats but not usually killed by them, as “the master’s interest coincided with theirs” when it came to their survival. Peasants “enjoyed that type of vegetative happiness whose charm is as difficult for the highly civilized man to understand as its existence is difficult for him to deny.” For their part, aristocrats lived in luxury but not in comfort. “Comfort presupposes a large class whose members are simultaneously employed in trying to make life sweeter and more comfortable”—a middle class which neither provides necessities nor keens itself for military and political glory. Aristocratic life “was brilliant and lavish, but not commodious”; “they ate with their fingers from plates of silver or engraved steel.” Residents of provincial towns in the 1830s, he observes, enjoy more comfort “than did the proudest baron of the Middle Ages” (MP, 6). On one hand, “comfort was found nowhere,” not in the peasant’s hovel or the lord’s castle; on the other hand, there was “survival everywhere,” as peasants provided food and shelter for themselves and their rulers, while rulers cared for and protected peasants, often from the depredations of other rulers (MP, 7).

This means that Enlightenment philosophes and their revolutionary admirers took a phenomenon for a cause. True, the feudal aristocrats endowed their lands to their firstborn sons and found positions in the Catholic Church for their second-born sons, and Christianity became associated with the ruling class. But they did so only as a politic appropriation, not as a logical consequence of the religion itself, which stipulated not an aristocratic right to rule but the equality of all men under God.

Gradually, as feudalism established itself, both peasant cultivators and warrior aristocrats developed “new tastes,” tastes satisfied only by the establishment of a new class, a class of workers who left the land to “devote themselves to industry,” to the production of the goods that satisfied the new tastes. In a word, both classes became more civilized. “A vast displacement of population” occurred, as young peasants moved into the cities, seeking jobs that catered to the newfound taste for commodious living that both they and the aristocrats had discovered in themselves (MP, 7). In this, “they obeyed the immutable laws governing the growth of organized societies” (MP, 8). Tocqueville here does not pronounce on whether these laws are natural or ‘historical,’ although they do seem grounded in human nature; the growth of organized societies evidently instantiates the human equality that Christianity revealed to all men, a natural fact that the few amongst ‘the ancients’ had previously kept assiduously to themselves. Be this as it may, he diverges from Hegel and Marx by positing no known limit to the movement of this growth. The laws of social growth may have a telos, but Tocqueville does not claim to know what it is. This absence of finality leaves room for human liberty, which he famously opposes to the dangers that egalitarianism brings in its wake.

The more the new class produces, the more commodities there are to ease the lives of ‘the many’ and not only the few. But “these happy outcomes have not been achieved without a necessary cost.” Some decades back, I talked with one of my fellow college freshmen about his parents, who had lived in Georgia in the 1930s. He surprised me by saying he anticipated another Great Depression and indeed looked forward to it. “The Morgans did rather well in the last Depression,” he claimed, contentedly. “We stayed on our farm, raised enough crops to feed ourselves and, after the Depression was over, we were the only ones in the county who had any money. We cleaned up!” That is indeed the advantage of subsistence agriculture. As Tocqueville puts it, “The farmer produces basic foodstuffs,” but even if market prices bring him no profit for a year or two, “these products at least furnish the means of life to those who have harvested them and allow them to wait for better times” (MP, 8).

The industrial worker is not so lucky. He “speculates on artificial and secondary needs that can be limited by a thousand causes and can be completely eliminated by great events” (MP, 8). Having “received from God the special and dangerous mission of providing, by [their] own risks and dangers, the material happiness of all” the other classes, he serves them only at their convenience. “This is a major subject of reflection for today’s statesmen!” (MP, 9).

Nor is this pauperism’s only cause. While men and women may cut back on their expenses during a time of widespread economic hardship, in ordinary times, as wealth and prosperity grow, their desires “become, through habit and example, real needs.” The more needs one has, “the more greatly [one] exposes himself to the blows of Fortune” (MP, 10). If ‘modernity’ consists not only in the advance of social equality but the advance of men’s mastery of fortune—the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate by the means of experimental science applied in manufacturing industries—that mastery itself finds at least temporary limits in disruption of supply and even of demand. Not only may an infestation of insects ruin the cotton crop, sending the textile industry into crisis, but the tastes of the many or the few may shift, making last year’s fashions this year’s embarrassments. Popular opinion under conditions of social democracy matters more than it has since the Athenians’ political democracy, and it is no less fickle. These exigencies, too, throw workers out of work.

Here is where a Christian (and also a Rousseauian) sentiment comes in. When people are thrown out of work owing to no fault of their own, their fellow citizens feel compassion for them. Civil society wants to help them, attempting to “cure evils that it did not previously ever perceive.” “The more nations are wealthy, the more the number of those who appeal to public charity must multiply, because two very powerful causes tend toward this result: among these nations, the class most naturally exposed to need is increasing incessantly, and on the other side, needs themselves infinitely multiply and diversify; he opportunity of finding oneself exposed to some of them becomes more frequent every day” (MP, 11).

As always, Tocqueville urges moderation, deliberation, and calm. As we consider “the future of modern societies,” “let us not become drunk by the spectacle of [their] greatness”—as Hegel tended to do; “let us not become discourage by the sight of its miseries”—as Marx tended to do, before veering toward immoderate optimism on the wings of ‘dialectic.’ True, for most modern men “existence will be more comfortable, sweeter, more embellished, longer,” while others of us “will need to turn to the support of their fellow men in order to receive a tiny part of those goods.” “This double movement can be slowed…but no one can stop it” (MP, 11). It can, however, be ameliorated if statesmen are smart and tough as well as compassionate.” 

In addition to social democratization and the conquest of nature, modernity also features a particular kind of Christianity which generates a particular kind of beneficence. Tocqueville distinguishes two kinds of beneficence. “One leads each individual to relieve, according to his means, all the ills that are found within his reach,” an impulse “as old as the world”; Christianity made it a divine virtue and called it charity.” “The other, less instinctive, more rational, less enthusiastic, and often more powerful, leads society itself to concern itself with the misfortunes of its members and to attend systematically to the relief of their distress”; this kind of beneficence “was born out of Protestantism and is developed only in modern societies” (MP, 12). In England, this second kind of beneficence combined with a fourth feature of modernity: the modern state.

Tocqueville recalls how Protestant monarchs Henry VIII and Elizabeth I took over not only the institutions of Christian worship, against Roman Catholicism, but also one of the traditional functions of the church they replaced—charity—in the form of state-sponsored care for the poor. Although the “poor laws” preceded industrialization and urbanization, they were made even more necessary by them and were elaborated because of them. “England’s industrial class provides for the needs and the pleasures of not only the English people but also of a large part of humanity” in what we would now call the ‘global market’; if America is “the country of the future” respecting democracy, England is that with respect to political economy. England is “the country in the world in which the farmer is most strongly attracted to industrial work—but also finds himself the most exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune” (MP, 13). Having already “accepted the principle of legal charity, England was not able to depart from it,” given its subsequent socioeconomic modernization (MP, 14).

This has led to a challenge to English Protestantism, social equality, and the modern state. The nexus of industrialism and public charity has caused “the rebirth and spread across a Protestant country of those abuses for which the Reformation had rightly reproached some of the Catholic countries,” abuses connected to that “natural passion for idleness” seen in primitive man and civilized southern European monasteries alike. A person will work for two reasons: survival and “the desire to improve his living conditions.” Of these, the first is common, the second more rare. Most of us are not what were once called go-getters. Give me a steady diet, decent clothes, and a roof over my head and I probably will not dream of starting a business. That being so, “a charitable organization, open indiscriminately to all of those who are in need, or a law that givers to all poor—whatever the origin of their poverty—a right to public assistance, weakens or destroys the first stimulant and leaves only the second intact”—that is, the rarer one. Hence “the most generous, active and industrious part of the nation…devotes its assistance to furnishing the means of life to those who do nothing or who make bad use of their work” (MP, 15). “Every measure that establishes legal charity on a permanent basis and gives it an administrative form thus creates an idle and lazy class, living at the expense of the industrial and working class…. It reproduces all the vices of the monastic system, but without the lofty ideas of morality and of religion that often went with it. Such a law is a poisoned seed planted in the bosom of legislation. As in America, circumstances can prevent the seed from developing rapidly, but they cannot destroy it, and if the present generation escapes its influence, it will devour the well-being of the generations to come.” (MP, 17-18).

Generally speaking, “the idea of rights” “elevates and sustains the human spirit”; Tocqueville “find[s] something grand and virile” in a principle that brings the ruled up to the level of the ruler, entitling the ruled to make honorable demands upon the ruler. “But the right that the poor person has to obtain society’s assistance is unique, in that rather than elevating the heart of the man who exercises it, it debases him.” In making my claim to public charity I formalize my “poverty, weakness, and misconduct,” admit my “inferiority” to my neighbors (MP, 18). To exercise most rights, I vindicate my honor as man and citizen; to exercise this right, however, I must sacrifice my honor, perhaps even my self-respect. It is noteworthy that Tocqueville connects the idea of rights to the human spirit, to its potential for greatness. In Democracy in America he connected grandeur or greatness to human nature. [1] Further, this understanding of rights connects them not only to one of the best characteristics of human nature but to politics strictly speaking, the practice of ruling and being ruled Aristotle locates in the family bond between husband and wife, distinguishing this reciprocity from the one-way forms of rule also seen in the family, the rule of parents over children and of masters over slaves. Tocqueville also understands the distinctively human characteristic as a matter of the human spirit and mind, the self-respect of what Aristotle calls a rational animal. [2]

More, the original and perennial kind of kind of beneficence “establish[es] precious ties between the rich man and the poor one,” as “the act of generosity itself makes the giver interested in the one whose poverty he has undertaken to relieve” and inspires gratitude in the one helped. This was the beneficence displayed by feudal aristocrats and indeed by the aristocrat of antiquity. But under modern conditions of social equality, beneficence becomes impersonal. The “legal charity” seen in the modern state “is not like” the natural charity of beneficence of previous times. “Alms remain, but their morality is removed,” as the rich man “see in the poor man only a greedy stranger, summoned by the legislator to share his goods,” and the poor man “feels no gratitude for a benefit that could not be denied him.” Modern states develop civil societies divided into “two rival nations”; rich and poor “have existed since the beginning of the world,” but “public charity breaks the only line that could have been established between them” (MP, 19). A greedy stranger: a foreigner who should be a fellow-citizen, even if a weaker and dependent one, a stranger whose dependency precludes him from citizenship as surely as birth into a peasant family had done, but without the personal attention of feudalism and the small degree of a political relationship feudalism retained as a consequence of that attention.

Even worse, “if idleness in the midst of wealth, the hereditary idleness earned by works of service, the idleness surrounded with public regard, accompanied by inner contentment, interested by the pleasures of the mind, moralized by the exercise of thought—if this idleness,” that is, aristocratic idleness, “has been the mother of so many vices, what will come from a degraded idleness acquire from cowardice, earned by misconduct, that is enjoyed amid ignominy and that can only be endured to the extent that the soul of the one who suffers it becomes completely corrupted and degraded?” (MP, 19-20). Such a soul “knows the future, as an animal does, because he ignores destiny’s circumstances, and who is thus focused like the animal in the present and in the ignoble and fleeting pleasures hat the present offers to a brutalized nature.” Thus “the number of illegitimate children has risen continuously; that of criminals has grown incessantly” (MP, 20)—in both instances because public support obviates the need for husbands, as an unmarried mother “finds a kind of dowry in her infamy” (MP, 25). While enlightenment expands throughout the rest of the nation, moeurs become gentler, taste becomes more delicate, habits more polite,” the poor “fall back toward barbarism while in the midst of civilization’s wonders, their ideas and inclinations bring them closer to savages” (MP, 20). The equality of conditions prevailing in modern societies finds a countervailing pressure in this new source of social hierarchy.

Not only does this new social hierarchy lack the old aristocratic generosity, it also retains no vestige of aristocratic liberty—the spirit which, as readers of the Democracy and The Old Regime and the Revolution will recall, serves as an indispensable barrier against despotisms “hard” and “soft” in modern states. Unlike America, where the slogan “Go West, young man, go West” would make good sense as both an aspiration and as a safety valve to relieve the miseries of city dwellers, England “has immobilized one-sixth of their population”; not only do the poor find themselves unwelcome in a new town, but unlike feudal villeinage, which “forced the individual, against his will, to remain where he was born,” legal charity ” stops him from wanting to move away” (MP, 21).

What to do? Distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor is difficult. The English state can send overseers of the poor to every village; they can identify poor persons easily enough. But how can it prove its causes, case by case? “The laws will have declared that blameless poverty alone will be given assistance, but in practice, assistance will be given to all poverty” (MP, 16). Yet the sheer number of paupers makes this impossible to support. The English have therefore attempted the poorhouse system, whereby those identifiably impoverished must work. But this leads to an oversupply of workers and the consequent establishment of ‘make-work’ projects that empty public coffers as much as they direct ‘relief,’ albeit in a novel way. All of this only contributes to the tendency of modern democratic societies to generate a “regularized, permanent, administrative system” hose intended benefits will ruin the civic spirit of liberty and thereby denature the human beings who live under it. These societies may end, Tocqueville warns, in “a violent revolution in the state when the number of those who receive alms becomes as large as the number of those giving them and when the indigent not able to draw from the impoverished rich what is necessary for their needs, find it easier to strip them suddenly of their goods than to demand assistance from them” (MP, 27).

“I believe that beneficence must be a manly and reasoned virtue, not a feeble and thoughtless inclination”; otherwise, beneficence “is still a sublime instinct, but in my view, it does not deserve the name of virtue” (MP, 26). In this, American practices will not help, as Americans “have borrowed most of their institutions related to the poor from the English,” making charity “a political institution” through a system of poorhouses (Pauperism in America, 51). The result is the same: “Almost all of the genuine poor have contracted habits of laziness that are difficult to change,” as they associate work with the punishment of confinement (PA, 52). The (mostly Irish) poor “spend the summer in abundance and the winter in poor houses,” finding free employment as hired ‘hands’ on farms during the warm months before retreating indoors to what amounts to prison work in order to get out of the cold. As a result, “public charity has lost its character of shame for them, because thousands of men turn to it daily” (MP, 54). Dependency not liberty has become a way of life for them, making them de facto foreigners within the commercial republic.

this notwithstanding, the American model of civil association may offer some hope, if applied to the practice of charity. Civic associations are the institutions that reprise the personal and civic character of aristocratic society under conditions of democracy, of equality. “By regulating aid, associations of charitable people could give greater activity and power to individual beneficence” (MP, 26). It is to this possible remedy to the problem of modern poverty that Tocqueville turns in his Second Memoir on Pauperism, published four years after the first.

Tocqueville recalls Benjamin Franklin, “who was in the habit of saying that with order, activity, and economy, the road to fortune was as easy as the road to the market. He was right.” Even the poorest farmer exhibits these virtues because, unlike the industrial worker, he owns land. “With landed property comes thought of the future” (Second Memoir on Pauperism, 31). Since “among the means of giving men the feeling of order, activity, and economy, I have never known a more powerful one than facilitating their access to landed property”; and since “unlike landed property, we have still not discovered a way of dividing industrial property so that it is not made unproductive”; since, undivided, such property “has preserved the aristocratic form in modern nations” despite the overall trend toward civil-social democracy; and finally, since “we are still far” from the day when a balanced international market in industrial products will make “commercial crises” “rarer and less severe,” contemporary statesmen need “to find a means of giving the worker the small farmer’s spirit and habits of property ownership” (SMP, 33, 34).

Tocqueville knows two ways of doing this. What “initially seems the most efficacious” is to give the worker “an interest in the factory,” whether through profit sharing, pensions, stock options, or some other device (SMP, 35). Such proposals, however, “have always encountered two obstacles to their success”; capitalist entrepreneurs have proved reluctant to institute them (“a grave mistake,” but there it is); and up to this point, worker-owned businesses have usually failed. Nonetheless, Tocqueville maintains some hope for the latter enterprises. “As our workers gain broader knowledge and as the art of associating together for honest and peaceful goals makes progress among us, when politics does not meddle in industrial associations and when government, reassured about their goals, does not refuse them its benevolence and its support, we will see them multiply and prosper.” Yet although “the idea of workers’ industrial associations is bound to be a fertile one…I do not think it is ripe” (SMP, 36).

Other reformers urge that the best thing to do is to provide the incentives and means for proletarians to build their savings. In their view, “the only means to give the industrial class the spirit and habit of property that a large portion of the agricultural class possesses” is the state-owned savings bank (SMP, 37). Tocqueville doubts it. Even if state owned, such banks would still be subject to mass withdrawals in the event of financial panic; they would accelerate excessive state centralization, already the bane of democratic societies; they would also lead to increased financial centralization, further enriching the cities and starving the provinces for investment capital. “I cannot believe that it would be wise to place the entire fortune of a large kingdom’s poor classes in the same hands, and so to speak, in a single place,” where a major crisis would ruin the depositors (SMP, 40). This poses an especially noticeable threat in France, where both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ regimes declared bankruptcy and where there have been numerous changes of regime, military invasions, and other serious disruptions of civil life. Savings banks, yes: but only as one measure, not to be misconceived as “a universal panacea” for the problem of poverty (SMP, 43). 

Tocqueville prefers banks that would combine savings with loans. At the “savings-and-loan” bank, “poor people who have money to lend would deposit it in the hands of the administrators, and they, in return for collateral, would return that money to those poor who might need to borrow it”; that is, “the thrifty poor or those momentarily favored by fortune would lend their savings at interest to the wasteful or unfortunate poor.” That does not sound like an especially promising financial model, except that “there is nothing more certain in the world than a collateralized loan,” as any pawnshop owner will tell you (SMP, 44). And, of course, the loan with collateral as its insurance will make at least some of the wasteful or unfortunate poor begin to think in terms of the future—in Franklinian terms, as it were.

Very well, but what about the provinces? What can be done for the rural poor, to dissuade them from seeking their fortunes in the city factories? Tocqueville suggests a kind of township association. These associations “would have no political character” and would be separate from government without being hostile to it (Letter on Pauperism in Normandy, 47). they would embrace no more than three townships—preferably only one. Members would pool their available monies; a board of directors would distribute those monies but the members themselves would be first in line to receive assistance. Because “no one would be able to count on the members’ aid in advance” and the members themselves would determine who got the loans, the associations would not draw additional poor people into its territory. Members could quit at any time, so there would be no “risk for making poverty an insupportable burden,” as it is with state-sponsored charity (LPN, 48). “Once the association was well established, even the poor themselves would be able to place summer savings into the association’s hands in order to be entitled to its benefits in winter”—obviating the need for poorhouses. The available revenues would exceed those available to any local aristocrat, however generous and well-heeled. And “because the collective funds would be used systematically and in accordance with a fixed plan, a very small contribution would be enough to relieve a great deal of poverty” (LPN, 49). And the money would “stay local.” The association would assist members “only under the condition that the recipient would not beg,” thereby causing “the disappearance of those demeaning habits that take away poverty’s respectable face, that deprave childhood and most often follow a generation of indigents with a generation of thieves.” Finally, the existence of such an association would give each township the moral authority “to expel nonresident indigents from its midst” on the grounds that all townships should care for their own paupers (LPN, 50). the proposal comports with Tocqueville’s aim of defending liberty in democratizing modern societies by encouraging habits of heart and mind, along with strong local institutions, intended to strengthen local resistance to administrative centralization and to vindicate and defend, intellectual, moral, economic, and political liberty.

In bringing these fascinating pieces into the English language and writing a fine introduction that gets her readers right down to business, editor and translator Christine Dunn Henderson has contributed not only to our understanding of Tocqueville to clear thinking about poverty and the attempts we make to ameliorate it. Much of what Tocqueville told his contemporaries speaks to us, suggesting that we could still use a measure of his vigorous and astringent common sense.

 

Notes

1. See Tocqueville, Democracy in America II.i.3.
2. In the Democracy, Tocqueville makes his explicit statement on natural rights quite appositely in a passage condemning slavery; see Democracy in America I.ii.10. Also, in his July 1839 Report Made to the Chamber of Deputies on the Abolition of Slavery in the French Colonies, he advocated abolition on the basis of “the principles of justice, humanity, and reason” while denying that “Negro Slavery” has “its foundation and justification in nature herself”—a claim he describes as “odious.”

 

 

Johann Wolfgang Goethe: The Sufferings of Young Werther. Stanley Corngold translation. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013.

 

Written in 1774 when Goethe was twenty-five years old, revised for republication in 1787, The Sufferings of Young Werther had the unfortunate effect of inducing suicide among any number of its first readers, rather to its author’s discomfiture (hence the soberer second edition, translated here). Years after the roil subsided, Goethe ruefully observed that writing the book had been therapeutic for him but not for its readers. Whereas “I felt relieved and open now that I had transformed reality into poetry, my friends were confused, thinking that it was necessary to transform poetry into reality and act out such a novel, possibly shooting themselves.” If classic tragedy induces catharsis in its audience, Goethe’s modern tragedy induced it only in the author. Why?

Goethe explains this unhappy éclat by invoking the temper of his generation, reacting as it did to the excesses of Enlightenment rationalism. To the Enlighteners’ optimism, his contemporaries opposed readings in English literature—not, to be sure, buoyant, gritty Chaucer or Shakespeare’s politic comedies but tragic “Hamlet and his soliloquies”—those “ghosts that haunted all the young minds and hearts,” bringing “everyone” to suppose “himself to be just as melancholic as the Prince of Denmark though he had seen no ghost and had no royal father to avenge.” To this, the young men of Goethe’s time added the poetry of ‘Ossian,’ whose foreboding landscapes challenged the secularist light of le sage Locke and his admirer, Voltaire. “In such an element and in such surroundings, with hobbies and studies of this kind, tormented  by ungratified passions, never externally stimulated to perform any meaningful actions, our only prospect the need to endure in a sluggish, vacuous, bourgeois existence—we grew accustomed, in a sort of petulant arrogance, to the idea that when life no longer suited us, we could always take leave of it any way we pleased, and thus we managed as best we could to get through the tribulations and tedium of each day.” Modern rationalism was boring, particularly among those classes who had the leisure to read books. If Werther is the ‘type’ of the anti-rationalist, anti-Enlightenment, Sturm und Drang generation, young men who set passion against reason, subject against object, it might be said that in making themselves into the opposite of the Enlighteners they produced another version of Bacon’s ‘conquest of nature’—the conquest now turned inward, ‘subjectively,’ resulting in willed self-destruction. It remained for rationalism to marry irrationalism, technology to put itself at the service of imagination; there tragedy really began in politics, with fascist and communist mass-murder and tyranny committed by men aspiring to ideality, achieving catastrophe.

With its epistolary framework, Werther resembles many of the most widely-read ‘bourgeois’ novels of the previous century; it departs from them in being very short. Introspection needs less exposition than observation of the world; even Werther’s descriptions of nature are really about himself. “Dearest friend,” he writes to Wilhelm, “what a thing it is, the human heart!” He regrets how he stirred unrequited love for himself in a girl named Leonore, protesting “I was innocent,” while admitting he was not entirely so: “Did I nourish her feelings? Didn’t I delight in those genuine expressions of her nature that so often made us laugh, though they were not laughable at all?” He promises to “improve.” Moreover, “I will not chew over the bit of woe that fate presents us with, the way I have always done; I will enjoy the present and let bygones be bygones”—he, who had suffered no injustice—avoiding the human tendency “to summon up memories of old woes rather than accept an indifferent present.” The older Goethe explained the futility of this resolution, arguing that “our virtues rest upon our faults as on their roots, and the latter branch out surreptitiously just as strongly and variously as do our virtues in the light of day”; the more we strive for the good, the cleverer (as it were) our flaws become. Enlightenment can only lead to a more complex ‘endarkenment’—a claim which, if true, confirms the Christian sense of sin (“Who can know it?” Paul asks, considering the sinfulness of the human heart) against Voltaire on the one hand, Rousseau on the other. This suggests that the ‘totalitarian’ tyrannies of twentieth century, which even Goethe did not envision, had to arise out of the modern project, and that there might be worse to come. (The Chinese communists, after all, seem altogether smarter than their Russian counterparts, and both more ‘sensible’ than Hitler.)

Werther is on the road to clear up a problem with his mother’s inheritance. His aunt has withheld a portion of it but is now ready to release more of it than he had asked for. “I have learned from this little piece of business that misunderstanding and neglect may cause more confusion in the world than do cunning and malice”—an ‘enlightened’ thought if ever there was one. His predominant mood derives less from the Enlightenment, however, than from Rousseau, as he contrasts the natural beauty of the garden and surrounding countryside of the estate he will inherit with the “unpleasant” town nearby. “A wonderful gaiety has seized my entire soul, like the sweet spring mornings I wholeheartedly enjoy. I am alone and glad to be alive in this place, which is made for souls like mine”—so happy, “so deeply immersed in the sense of calm existence that my art is suffering.” Overwhelmed by his oneness with nature, from “the lovely valley” under “the midday sun” to the tiny blades of grass and the insects which live among them, he “feel[s] the presence of the Almighty Who created us in his image.” He can’t draw or paint; “I succumb to the force of the splendor of these displays” in a loss of self, a living, joyous ‘suicide.’ Everything here “appear[s] like paradise.” Here, “I treat my heart like a sick child, its every wish is granted.” Inheritance and childhood will weave their way into his sensibility, up to the moment of his self-destruction.

In society, he brings these communal, egalitarian, Rousseauian sentiments with him. The children in the village of Wahlheim “are fond of me,” surprised that, unlike other “persons of standing,” who “always keep coldly distant from the common people,” “pretend[ing] to descend to their level in order to make the poor commoners feel their superiority all the more keenly,” Werther “believe[s] that the person who feels it necessary to keep aloof from the so-called rabble in order to maintain his dignity is just as reprehensible as the coward who hides from his enemy lest he be defeated.” If, unlike Isaac and his son Jacob, who meet their future wives at the village well, he finds no wife in this village, he does graciously help a servant girl struggling to bring the jug filled with the water she has drawn. 

He nonetheless feels the difference between himself and the villagers, despite their charming lack of bourgeois dullness. “The human race—it’s a uniform thing. Most people spend the greatest part of the time struggling to stay alive, and the little bit of freedom they have left makes them so anxious that they’ll look for any means to get rid of it.” As for himself, these “very good kind of people” relieve him of his melancholy but cannot provide the companionship he longs for; “so many other force lie dormant in me, all rotting away unused, which I must carefully conceal”—an effort that “so constricts my heart.” It is “the fate of our sort”—those at leisure to think more carefully, to feel more profoundly?—to yearn not for ridding themselves of freedom from the day-to-day but to live within it. “Alas, that friend of my youth has gone,” she of “great soul in whose presence I seemed to myself to be more than I was because I was everything I could be.” Now dead, she is the one with whom he was preoccupied, even as lovelorn Leonore wasted her feelings on him.

And so he turns inward. “I turn back into myself and discover a world!” It is a world wherein “everything swims before my senses, and I go on, smiling dreamily into the world.” Locke regards the senses as the reliable portals to the external world, but for the anti-Lockean man they turn the empirical world, known with certainty only through them, into a landscape of reverie. “Like children,” Werther writes, “adults also stumble through the world, and like children, do not know whence they come and whither they go, nor act to some true purpose any more than children do, and like them are ruled by cookies and cakes and birch rods—no one likes to think that, and yet to me it is palpable truth.” Yet this is not enough for men of “our sort”—those “who in all humility realize the sum total, who see how neatly every contented citizens can shape his little garden into a paradise, and how tirelessly even the merest wretch, panting, makes his way beneath his burden, all of them equally determined to see the light of the sun one minute longer—yes, that man keeps still, and he creates his world out of himself, and he is happy because he is human. And then, confined as he is, he still always keeps in his heart the sweet sense of freedom, knowing that he can leave this prison whenever he chooses.” Even in his Rousseauian bliss, Werther already makes the choice of suicide, Hamlet’s “to be or not to be?” not only a question but the source of life’s sweetness. Against scientistic determinism, which fears freedom because it doesn’t know what to do with it, he upholds subjectivism. Rejecting happiness in the ordinary, human-all-too-human sense as too banal, too ‘bourgeois,’ too much the fruit of false enlightenment, he falls back on a freedom that finds, and perhaps can only find, satisfaction in nihilism. 

For this, art offers no real solace. In the village, away from the nature that overcomes him, he draws a picture of a little boy and his infant brother, “a well-composed, very interesting drawing” into which he introduces not “the slightest bit of myself.” But this only “strengthened me in my resolve to stay exclusively with nature. It alone is infinitely rich, and it alone forms the great artist.” For young Werther, it must be greatness or nothing. The same goes for artistic and social rules; just as artistic rules prevent the “man formed by them” from “produc[ing] anything vapid or in poor taste,” so “someone shaped by the laws and decorum” of society “can never become an unbearable neighbor or a notorious villain.” “On the other hand, say what you will, rules will destroy the true feeling of nature and the genuine expression thereof,” especially when it comes to love, ruined by calculations of making a living. “If the young man agrees” to such constraints, “the result is a useful member of society, and I myself will advise any prince to give him a place on a council; except that there’s an end to his love, and if he is an artist, to his art.” “Sedate gentlemen dwell on both banks of the stream” in their “little summer houses” with their “tulip beds and cabbage patches”—all of which would be ruined by “the torrent of genius,” which they therefore attempt to redirect and control, to the ruin of the genius. As for Rousseau, for Werther there can be no truce between the exception and the rule; they are at war. But unlike the philosopher who, being rational, can think of ways to escape the coils of convention, the genius-as-artist and the genius-as-lover refuses such ways ‘in principle’ or, more accurately ‘by sentiment’—sentiment valorized by its very rejection of unerotic reasoning of the modern sort. Werther affirms this way of ordering the genius’s soul when he meets a young peasant who is in love with a widow who employs him “Never in my life have I seen urgent desire and hot, ardent craving in such purity: indeed I can say, a purity such as I have never conceived or dreamed of.” So entranced is Werther by this that he determines never to meet the youth’s beloved, as “it is better to see her through the eyes of her lover; it may be that in my own eyes she would not appear as she stands before me know, and why should I spoil this beautiful image?” Why let reality intrude upon a creature of his imagining? 

The problem with such a firm rejection of reality is that reality tends to obtrude upon imagination, nonetheless. He is about to experience the parallel of both Lenore’s unrequited passion and the unrequited passion of the young peasant, after meeting Charlotte, who is already engaged to “a very good man, who is away on a trip.” Beautiful, kind, and intelligent, she shares Werther’s literary tastes (esteeming Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and, even better, storm-loving, impassioned Klopstock) and his tastes in music. [1] Lotte is even a sort of virgin mother, a secular Mary, who cares for her brothers and sisters because her mother has died. And “you should see her dance! You see, she is so absorbed, so carefree, so natural, as if this were the only thing in the world, as if she thought or felt nothing else; and in such moments everything else surely does vanish from her mind.” Like Werther in nature, she becomes one with what envelops her. They dance together, and he is gone in rapture.

“I am living such happy days as God reserves for His saints; and no matter what happens to me, I cannot say that I have not tasted the joys, the purest joys of life.” The difficulty is that God reserves happy days for those who love Him, not for those who love girls, however wonderful. And this girl is engaged to be married. When he writes to Wilhelm, describing his morning routine of making breakfast and comparing himself to “Penelope’s suitors” as they slaughtered, carved, and roasted oxen and swine, his reader (beginning with Wilhelm?) cannot but recall the fact that Odysseus eventually returned, with bad results for the suitors. Werther does not know himself.

After all, the ill-fated suitors were men, but secularized-Christian Werther, in love with another man’s Mary, wants to be a child—again in imitation of the Biblical command. “Yes, dear Wilhelm, the children are of all things on earth closest to my heart. When I watch them and see in these small beings the seeds of all the virtues, all the powers they will one day need so urgently…when I see all of it so unspoiled, so intact!—I repeat over and over again the golden words of the teacher of mankind: Unless you become as little children! and yet, dear friend, they who are our equals, whom we ought to consider our models, these we treat as inferiors.” But Jesus invites us to become as little children in terms of trusting our Father and His Word; He never suggests that children are without sin. Werther lives out a Christianity in which eros replaces agape and calls itself pure, taking children (the human beings least buffeted by real erotic longing) as models of such purity. 

That he fails to see any of this his readers do see when he describes his time spent with an elderly pastor and his wife, whose daughter’s taciturn, jealous suitor annoys Werther. Jealousy is the obverse of love of one’s own—the theme of possession first introduced when we learned that Werther came to the village in a successful attempt to settle the status of his inheritance. He delivers himself of a short sermon, “speaking out very bluntly against bad moods” and intoning that “if our hearts were always open to enjoy the good that God puts before us each day, we would also be strong enough to endure the bad whenever it comes.” When the pastor’s wife ventures to object that “we have no control over our feelings” because “so much depends on our bodies,” he grants the point while continuing to insist, “a lot depends on ourselves. I know it does with me…. Bad moods are just the same as laziness, for they are a sort of laziness. Our natures are prone to it, and yet, if we just once summon up the strength to pull ourselves together, work flies from our hands, and we find real pleasure in being active.” Bad moods are a vice, “harm[ing] ourselves and our neighbors,” robbing them of their own “simple joys,” making happy people unhappy. “All the gifts, all the favors the world can bestow cannot replace an instant of pleasure in oneself that our tyrant’s envious discontent has turned to bile.” Lotte, who has accompanied him to the pastor’s home, “scolded me on the way back about my excessive emotional involvement in everything and how that would lead to my destruction!”—a telling admonition which only intensifies his emotional involvement as he recalls thinking, “Oh, you angel! For your sake I must live!” And if she cannot be his, ‘must’ he not then die? He continues to model himself after children: “God makes us happiest when He lets us stumble about in our amiable delusions,” as indulgent adults let children do. He then goes on to deplore “the unbelievable self-deception of the human mind,” illustrated by the story of a stingy husband who never suspected that his wife was stealing from him in order to support their children—another Biblical allusion, secularized for purposes of his own self-deception, now pronouncing judgment on the self-delusion of another.

But “No, I am not deceiving myself!” when it comes to Lotte. He is sure that she loves him. And “how I worship myself ever since she has come to love me!” His subjectivism results in self-worship of an especially vulnerable kind, depending as it does on the love of another, about whom he may well be deceiving himself, as he recognizes “when she speaks about her fiancé with such warmth, such love,” making Werther “feel like a man deprived of all his honors and titles and stripped of his sword”—emasculated, Freud would say. He nonetheless persists. “She is sacred to me,” and when she plays a certain tune on the piano “with the touch of an angel, so simple and so soulful,” the “confusion and darkness of my soul disperse, and I breathe freely again.” Freedom for Werther is to be ruled under a benevolent monarch, a human goddess who reciprocates his passion, as he ardently wishes (and thus believes) that she does. 

His friend, Wilhelm, tries to talk some sense into him, suggesting that he get a job—one fit for a young gentleman, in which he would accompany an ambassador on a mission abroad. No, never: “I do not like being anyone’s subordinate, and we all know that on top of this the man is odious”; moreover, “anyone who works himself to the bone to please others, for money or honor or whatever else, without its being his own passion, his own necessity, is a perfect fool.” His freedom is really an expression of his imagined fate or necessity, a submission to his beloved justified by his desire alone, despite her engagement to another.

The fiancé, Albert, arrives a month after Werther had met Lotte. “Even if he were the best, the noblest of men, one to whom I’d be ready to subordinate myself in every way, it would still be unbearable to see him take possession of such perfection—Possession!” Possessiveness: love of one’s own, contested whenever the matter of what is rightly one’s own comes to be contested, as it is with property and erotic love, alike. And yet, admittedly, Albert is “a fine, dear man,” and “I have to love him for the regard he shows her”; “he knows what a treasure he has in Lotte.”  What is more, “his calm exterior stands in sharp contrast to my natural restlessness, which cannot be concealed”; Albert seldom commits the sin of indulging in a bad mood. Because of him, and his nature, “my joy in being with Lotte is gone”—well, except for the fact that he is “always happy when I find her alone.” To Wilhelm’s firm advice to submit to the circumstances he chafes under, Werther “concede[s] your entire argument” while “still search[ing] for a way to slip in between the either and the or.” “Yes, Wilhelm, there are moments when I feel a fit of courage to spring up and shake it all off and then—if only I knew where to, I think I would go.” He admits that he has “acted like a child,” even as he had so recently written encomia to childishness and their supposed purity. “I could be leading the best, the happiest life if I weren’t a fool.” Christians, too, are commanded to be fools, as well as children, but, again, hardly in this way. 

Sensible Albert tries to admonish him, when it comes to folly. He tells Werther a cautionary tale about an accident with a pistol. A servant mistakenly injured a servant girl, accidentally discharging the weapon, which Albert had given him to clean. Since that time, he keeps all his weapons unloaded. Werther tires of Albert’s attempt at self-excuse. “I finally stopped listening altogether, fell into a black mood”—the vice he had condemned in another—and makes a gesture of committing suicide with the pistol. Albert snatches it from him, saying, “I cannot imagine that a man can be so foolish as to shoot himself; the mere thought fills me with revulsion.” Folly, again, and Werther can no longer suppress his own anger, leading to the dialogue that won some young ‘romantics’ to side with Werther, against his sympathetic but critical creator, Goethe. 

Werther’s argument is a powerful one, persuasive to many. “Why is it that you people, I exclaimed, whenever you speak about anything, immediately find yourself saying: this is foolish, this is clever, this is good, this is bad! And what is that supposed to mean? Have you investigated the deeper circumstances of an action to that end? Are you able to explain the causes definitively, why it happened, why it had to happen? If you had done so, you would not be so hasty with your judgments.” Why it had to happen: This is the old pastor’s wife’s argument, the argument from necessity. He concedes Albert’s counter-argument, that some “actions are vicious, however they occur, whatever motives are adduced,” while insisting that even there, “there are some exceptions”—the man who steals to save himself and his family from starvation, the enraged husband who kills his “faithless wife and her worthless seducer,” or “the girl who, in an hour of ecstasy, gives herself over to the irresistible joys of love.” In such circumstances, “even our laws, these cold-blooded pedants, can be moved to withhold their punishment.” Yes, Albert replies, but this isn’t the same as carelessly inflicted injury of the type they are discussing, “because a man swept away by passion loses all his powers of reason and is viewed as a drunkard or a madman.” 

This brings Werther to the core of his argument, a version of which Nietzsche would advance at the end of the century, with consummate rigor and refinement. “Oh, you rationalists!…. You stand there so calmly, without any understanding, you moral men! You chide the drinker, despise the man bereft of his senses, pass by like the priest, thank God like the Pharisee that he did not make you also one of these. I have been drunk more than once, my passions were never far from madness, and I regret neither: for in my own measure I have learned to grasp how all extraordinary men who have achieved something great, something seemingly impossible, have inevitably been derided as drunkards or madmen…. Shame on you, you men of sobriety! Shame on you, you wise men!” At this, poor Albert recovers sufficiently to observe that suicide is no great deed, only “a weakness,” as “it is easier to die than to endure steadfastly a life of torment.” 

At this “vacuous commonplace” Werther’s indignation only intensifies. “You call that weakness? I beg of you, don’t be misled by appearances. A people groaning under the unbearable yoke of a tyrant, do you call them weak when they finally rise up and break their chains?” Before considering this argument, one must first answer Werther’s initial claim, which Albert fails to address. Werther is right to say that the men he (mis)calls rationalists— who are really conventionalists, defenders of the prevailing moral opinions of the regime they esteem (usually because they love ‘their own,’ unthinkingly and therefore not rationally at all)—typically do regard those who swerve from those opinions as defective, out of their minds for some reason or other. Such dissenters sometimes do achieve greatness, although (it must be added) usually they don’t, precisely because they really are as defective as their pious detractors say. What is needed is a criterion for greatness which distinguishes it from madness, vice, or folly. This is what Albert sees; his commonplace response isn’t entirely vacuous.

And so Werther proclaims a criterion for greatness, which seems to be freedom, freedom from the unbearable yoke of the tyrant. Where does that criterion come from? “Human nature, I continued has its limits: it can endure joy, sorrow, pain up to a certain degree, and it perishes the minute it is exceeded. Here, then, the question is not whether one is weak or strong but rather whether one can endure the measure of one’s suffering—be it moral or physical; and I find it just as odd to say that the man who takes his own life is a coward”—a moral weakling—as “it would be improper to call the man who dies from a malignant fever a coward.” Some passions overwhelm the human being, whether they be the joy in immersion in nature Werther once felt, or the despair he is now beginning to feel. This is the moral equivalent of the physical “sickness unto death,” when the natural “forces” of a human being are “so lamed that it is no longer able to recover.” For the mind, “look at a man within his limitations, the way impressions affect him, ideas become entrenched in him, until finally a growing passion robs him of all his powers of calm reflection and destroys him. It is futile for the composed, rational man to appraise the condition of the unhappy person, futile to cheer him up!” To Albert’s objection, that “an intelligent man” would not behave that way, Werther ripostes, “A man is a man, and the modicum of reason he might have counts for little or nothing when passion rages and the limits of human being press against him!” 

Undoubtedly so. But how does this justify the condition of the soul that causes its passions to become so powerful that they overwhelm the “modicum of reason”? And if reason is indeed only a modicum with most men, is law and convention not necessary to their well-being? As for the geniuses, how great are they, if they are ruled by passions, however powerful? That is, does reason (if not necessarily the calculating, self-regarding, unerotic rationalism of the Enlightenment) not rightly set the limits on passion in a human being, that is, a being in whom reason is the distinctive natural characteristic, not passion? Albert’s attempt to distinguish the intelligent man from the impassioned one has more weight, if abstracted from Albert’s own conventionalism. Even that conventionalism has its merits, given the lack of genius, the lack of greatness, in the vast majority of impassioned men. The real geniuses are the ones who see not only the limits of human nature, vis-à-vis the passions, but the grandeur of human nature, given the limits reason sets on the passions. In this, Werther sets himself against Goethe who, with fine irony, has his protagonist inveigh against authors who revise their books because such meddling loses the original poetic inspiration. 

Caught in this self-contradiction, this war with the nature of his own soul which he stages as a psychomachia of noble passion against unintelligent intellect, Werther asks, “Does it have to be this way, that whatever it is that makes a man blissfully happy in turn becomes the source of his misery?” He is now tormented by nature, no longer able to immerse himself in it. In love with supposed necessity, he criticizes the human illusion that “we govern the whole wide world,” when in fact we are only “so little.” “It is as if a curtain had been drawn back from my soul, and the spectacle of infinite life is transformed before my eyes into the abyss of an ever-open grave”—the Heraclitean sense that “everything passes,” that the river (whose torrents he had likened to the marvelous upsurge of genius) submerges everything, shattering it “on the rocks,” the death-dealers which alone are permanent. Now reversing his earlier sense of nature as the supreme harmony, he writes, “my heart is undermined by the destructive force that is concealed in the totality of nature; which has never created a thing that has not destroyed its neighbor or itself”; nature is an “eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster.” If nature is monstrous, then nature is unnatural, at least with regard to humans, whose feeble efforts to govern it are useless. When faithful Wilhelm sends him a better edition of Homer than the one he was using, Werther replies, “If my sickness could be cured, these people,” the heroes of Greek antiquity, “would cure it.” 

Self-reprimand doesn’t help, either. “Wretched creature! Are you not a fool! Aren’t you deluding yourself? What is the meaning of this raging, endless passion?” The answer: “Adieu! I see no end to this misery except the grave.” Making what he expects to be his final meeting with Lotte, he greets her little brothers and sisters with a Christlike, “Bring them to me,” although he has no power to redeem them, then tells her, “We will meet again, we will find each other, we will know each other among all the shapes” in the afterlife. She doesn’t take him seriously.

Suicide, not yet. Instead, he accedes to the sensible solution, going away in the employ of the ambassador, attempting to find solace in work. It works for a time, and he meets another kindred spirit, the “broad-minded” Count C., “who, even though he has so comprehensive a view” of things, “is not coldhearted, whose company radiates…much capacity for friendship and love”; “there is no joy in the world so true or heartwarming as seeing a great soul opening itself to one.” Still, a month later he complains that his employer “is the most exacting fool in the world,” “never satisfied with himself” and therefore “impossible to please”—the small-souled counterpart to Count C.’s greatness of soul. He blames Wilhelm for suggesting the notion of such employment, inflicting upon him as it does “the perfect misery, the boredom among these vile people on view here,” with “their thirst for rank,” always “looking to gain the advantage of one tiny step ahead of the other.” Rousseau-like, he chafes under “the disastrous social conditions” of rank. 

He then meets another woman, Fräulein B., whose “great soul, which shines out from her blue eyes,” reminds him of Lotte. “She longs to be away from the hubbub, and for many an hour we fantasize about rustic scenes of unalloyed bliss.” But when he stays too long at a party arranged by his friend and patron, the Count, failing to leave immediately after his social ‘betters’ have arrived, she can only pity him and then endure criticism from her aunt for having associated with such a boor. He offers his resignation, and it is accepted. With nowhere to go, and any chance of marrying Fräulein B. precluded, “I just want to be nearer to Lotte, that’s all”—Lotte, who has by now married Albert.

Upon returning to Wahlheim, he hears how the peasant boy who had fallen in love with the lady who had employed him “tried to take her by force; he did not know what had come over him, as God was his witness, his intentions toward her had always been honorable, and there was nothing he had desired more fervently than that she should marry him and spend her life with him.” She forgave him but her brother kicked him out of the house, not wanting his sister to marry anyone because he wanted his children to receive the family inheritance. In this, the reason for the themes of inheritance and childhood and their pairing becomes clearer. It is more than a question of possession and of possessiveness, although it is that. Inheritance is the human custom that ends childhood. The parent intends to extend his care for his child beyond his grave, yet at the same time the introduction of property disputes adulterates the love that engendered the children, ending their childhood innocence once and for all. In this case, it has also blocked the love between a man and a woman which might have issued in a new family.

As for adultery itself, Lotte “would have been happier with me than with him! Oh, he is not the man to fulfill all the desires of her heart”; “his heart does not beat sympathetically” when they read together, if they read together. And yet, “he loves her with all his soul, and what doesn’t that sort of love deserve?”—even if his soul is inferior to mine. “I am not the only one to whom this happens. All men are disappointed in their hopes, deceived by their expectations,” as he has seen when a local woman lost her first son and her husband failed to obtain his inheritance. Then again, “What if Albert were to die?” Is he really as happy with her as he seems? In all this, “Ossian has driven Homer from my heart,” the forlorn wanderer through storms replacing the courageous husband determined to return home. “Alas, this void! This dreadful void that I feel in my breast!—I often think: If you could press her to your heart just once, just once, the entire void would be filled.” But “I could often rend my breast and bash my brains out when I realize how little we can mean to one another.” His “feelings for her swallow everything” he possesses. For her part, Lotte “has reproached me for my excesses,” but with “Oh such charm and kindness,” thereby feeding them. In answer to another of Wilhelm’s entreaties, he confesses that religion does not console him: “Does not the Son of God himself say that those shall be with him whom the Father has given to him? Now, what if I have not been given?” And Jesus asked his Father, Why hast thou forsaken me?” He received no more answer than has Werther. “God in Heaven! Have You so designed man’s fate that they are happy only before they arrive at reason,” in childhood, “and after they lose it!”

“What is man, the celebrated demigod!”—the Homeric hero who can no longer serve as a model for his conduct. “Does he not lack strength precisely where he needs it most? And if he soars upward in joy or sinks down in sorrow,” as Werther had done, “will he not be arrested in both, just there, just the, brought back to dull, cold consciousness when he was longing to lose himself in the fullness of the infinite?” Horror of horrors: What if the ‘bourgeois’ are, in some sense, right? If what is called mediocrity really is moderation?

Enter the Editor, a third-person narrator new to the second edition Goethe published. At this point, “Indignation and displeasure became more and more deeply rooted in Werther’s soul,” he writes, “growing ever more tightly entangled and gradually taking possession of his entire being. The harmony of his mind was completely devastated, an internal heat and violence, which labored to confuse all his natural powers, produced the most repellant effects and finally left with nothing but an exhaustion from which he sought to rise with even greater anxiety than when he had struggled with all the woes of his past.” When Lotte left to visit her ill father, Werther followed her, guiltily imagining that “he had destroyed the beautiful relationship between Albert and his wife.” Meanwhile, the lovesick village peasant murdered the man who replaced him in the household of his beloved, explaining to the authorities that now “No one will have her, she won’t have anyone.” “Love and loyalty, the most beautiful of human sentiments, and turned into violence and murder,” precisely because love is exclusive, even more than a form of property-holding, but in Christianity real and secular alike a matter of ‘one flesh.’ He once had looked for something in between having and not-having, some way of having Lotte even while knowing she was engaged to another. He no longer believes that possible.

Stating the obvious, Lotte told him “It cannot go on this way,” begging him to “learn moderation,” to “be calm and sensible for just one moment,” to stop “deluding yourself” and “willfully destroying yourself.” But as Werther himself had argued to Wilhelm, moderation, prudence, self-knowledge, and self-preservation aren’t exactly things one can learn as if they were lessons out of a book. It is also true that, as a reader suspects, Lotte hadn’t quite learned those virtues, either. Alone, she acknowledged that Albert was the right man for her—calm and reliable, a faithful husband and someone who “would always be for her and her children.” But “Werther had grown so dear to her…. The secret longing of her heart was to keep him for herself; and at the same time she told herself that she could not, might not keep him; her pure, beautiful spirit, usually so light and able so easily to manage difficulties, felt the pressure of a melancholy to which the prospect of happiness is barred.” Given the fact that “the harmony of their hearts and minds had been so beautifully evident,” it would be surprising if she did not feel at least some of the same thwarted longing that he feels. Each drowns in the well of subjectivity, the fault indeed being not in the stars but in themselves.

When he visited her one last time, they read Ossian together, the passage that goes, “The time of my fading is near, the blast that shall scatter my leaves.” In despair, a “terrible resolve” overtook him; he did what the young peasant did, seizing her and embracing his beloved, finally doing what he had dreamed would be the only thing that would bring him happiness. She pushed him away and said his name “in the collected tone of the loftiest feeling,” “trembling with love and fury,” telling him that he will never see her again. She had finally exercised the virtues she had preached. 

Not so for Werther, who left, convinced that she loved him and ready to die. In an ecstasy of erotic madness, he soliloquized: “I shall go before you! go to my Father, to your Father. To Him I will lament, and He will comfort me until you come and I fly to meet you and hold you and stay with you in never-ending embraces before the countenance of the Infinite Being. I am not dreaming, I am not delirious! Close to the grave, I see more clearly. We shall be!” He sent a note to Albert, asking to borrow his pistols, and Albert complied, telling Lotte to take them down. Did he know, too, that it could not go on like this, fixing on this way to end it and implicating his wife in that plan? Their servant delivered the pistols and Werther wrote in his suicide note, “You, celestial spirit, you favor my decision, and you Lotte, are handing me the implement, you from whose hands I wished to receive my death, and ah! receive it now.” Husband and wife had collaborated in the suicide, and part of each of them knew it. When his dying body was discovered, a copy of G. E. Lessing’s tragedy, Emilia Galloti, lay open on his desk. Werther had misunderstood it. The play is a critique of ‘subjectivism,’ of the notion that a man is an artist even if he only ‘feels’ that he is, without being able either to paint or to draw. As it is, “no clergyman attended” Werther’s funeral. It seems unlikely that he would have wanted one there.

The modern tragedy is the tragedy of radical individualism. That is why writing one draws the passions of fear, its attendant anger, and pity out of the author, who risks instilling them in his readers, men as solitary as he. He unwittingly wrongs wrongly-ordered souls.

 

Note

1. Goldsmith’s Vicar tells the story of lost inheritance spoiling an idyllic country life, albeit with a happy ending. Werther tells the story of a confirmed inheritance and the idyllic country life consequent to it spoiled by the disordered soul of the inheritor. Elsewhere, Goethe said that the Vicar combines the figures of priest and king—if not prophet— in “one person”; again in contrast, Werther is neither priestly nor kingly; he cannot even rule himself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Virus in the Age of Madness. Steven B. Kennedy translation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020.

 

 

What shocked Bernard-Henri Lévy about the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 “was not the pandemic” itself—influenza pandemics also killed millions, in the last century—but “the very strange way we reacted this time around,” the way much of mankind succumbed to an “epidemic of fear”—indeed, to “the First World Fear.” “The entire planet—rich and poor alike, those with the resources to resist and those without—pounced on the idea of an unprecedented pandemic poised to eradicate the human race.” Not the physical-medical crisis but the attendant moral-political crisis disturbs him. Borrowing the language of Foucault, Lévy finds the chill of the “medical gaze,” which treats persons as bodies takes the hospital as a model for society itself, far graver than the fever caused by the virus.

An experienced ‘public intellectual,’ Lévy’s rhetorical approach can only be admired. Speaking primarily as a man of the Left to the Left, he repeatedly denounces U.S. President Donald Trump (“impossible and unhinged,” “irresponsible,” “hapless,” a man “trampling the Constitution,” “pulling dirty tricks,” and “light[ing] America on fire”—somewhere between Richard Nixon and a fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse). This will surely inoculate him against criticism from that flank, and much-needed that prophylactic is, because the argument he advances puts him far closer to Trump than it does to Trump’s opponent in the presidential election campaign. Lévy gives former Vice President Joseph Biden a kindly and shrewd pat on the shoulder, saying he’s conducted his campaign “with courage and a level head,” while consistently departing from the Democrat’s masked-up public persona and his clamp-down approach to civil-social discipline. 

With Trump, Lévy knows that the world of medical research, like all parts of the academic world, “is a Kampfplatz, a battlefield, a free-for-all no less messy than the one Immanuel Kant bemoaned in metaphysics.” (Well, admittedly, Trump would omit the learned references, but he’s been saying the same thing.) Like Trump, Lévy “know[s] that listening to the ones who know, if we are indeed talking about scientists, is tantamount to listening to a nonstop quarrel and, if the listeners is a government, to inviting Fireworks and Chaos to sit at the king’s table.” “The emperor has no clothes, even if he is a physician. Especially if he is a physician.” Because would-be physician-emperors would rule the political communities the way they rule their wards and operating rooms. “There is a doctrine of hygienics that goes something like this: health becomes an obsession; all social and political problems are reduced to infections that must be treated; and the will to cure becomes the paradigm of political action.” Unfortunately, “the effects of that doctrine can be horribly perverse,” as seen in the last century, when hygienics became eugenics.

Plato’s Socrates saw the problem, Lévy notes. In the Statesman, the interlocutors consider “passing on the physician the responsibility for leading the human flock if the divine pastor drops the ball.” After all, the physician will see “the structural analogy between the animal body and the civic body,” with the head serving as ruler of the one, the “leader” serving as ruler of the other; “the same word, epimeleia…designates the care owed to the first and the administration at work in the second.” Yet Socrates finally demurs. “Politics, he says, is an art that, since the retreat of the gods, deals with a chaotic, changing world, swept by storms and rudderless.” “Difficult times” cause for “citizens-guardians possessing the audacity and strength to think through, carve into stone, and proclaim legal ‘codes.'” Masters of the art of the deal, the politikoi exhibit not only Trumplike smarts but Trumplike decision and determination, evidently even to the point of issuing executive orders. Physicians “might well have extended the health emergency until hell froze over,” but, as we all know and as Lévy shrewdly passes over in silence, Trump has wanted to ‘open up the economy.’ Like Trump, and, belatedly, like French President Emmanuel Macron, it is best to heed “the Platonic recommendation to rely, simply, on the Republic”—not so much raw public opinion but public opinion as refined and enlarged by the people’s representatives. “The republican authorities have grasped that, though the physicians are real heroes in one essential arena, they are neither God the Father nor the archons of a city in the grip of a new plague.” Despite “public opinion,” which “clearly wanted to see medicine calling the shots” (at least in France), one really must avoid “an incestuous union of the political and medical powers, a union that would have been not only incestuous but fatal for both partners, according to Foucault” and not only Foucault, given the irony with which Socrates treats his own proposal to make philosophers kings. Can there be any doubt that President Trump would respond to a proposal to make kings of philosophers, or of physicians, with anything other than a mocking ‘tweet’?

Having shrewdly put himself on Trump’s side while maintaining his bona fides with his audience, Lévy devotes many more of his pages to criticisms of, well, his audience. He skewers those who find ‘good’ in the pandemic, which has left our great cities so peaceful and clean and provides a convenient tool for political agitators. “‘A warning’ from nature, said one, demanding a transition to a world less destructive of biodiversity. ‘An ultimatum,’ said another, from a mistreated Gaia whose patience had worn thin. And, from all of them, servility with respect to the virus” or, perhaps more precisely, a demand for servility with respect to their own proposed policies. Having come to prominence as a firm critic of Communist tyranny during the Cold War, author of the seminal Barbarism with a Human Face at a time when much of the French Left in particular and the European Left generally sought to appease it, Lévy sees in the calls to suspend the ‘world economy’ nothing better than “the old Marxist refrain of the final crisis of capitalism in her morning-after guise of collapsology, or one of the children’s diseases of socialism updated as disasterism.” These socialist “profiteers of the virus” look for a scapegoat, finding it (as usual) in capitalism. Lévy prefers prudence. “To the extent possible, we had to calculate the numbers of lives saved by shutting down the world and compare it with the number imperiled by the shutdown.” It is, after all, “important not to be intimidated by the ultimately false opposition between ‘life’ and ‘the economy,’ but to compare the cost, in lives, of the spread of the virus with the cost of the self-induced coma triggered in a plan that was transformed suddenly into a laboratory for a radical political experiment.” “The only way” to do that “was to launch a major democratic debate and to get into detail, not about diverting utopias concerning the world after, but about the concrete measures to be implemented here and now in the world during.” 

“This was the first time we had ever seen all of the critical minds in the far-left galaxy applaud a state of emergency.” (True enough in the West, perhaps, although in Russia, in China, and in many other places under Communist rule, states of emergency were routinized, excusing the extermination of innumerable “harmful insects,” as Lenin unsentimentally put it.) “All of my life I have fought against the trap of secular religiosity,” even as his distinguished predecessor Alexis de Tocqueville had done, contemplating the Hegelians, Marxists, and race theorists of his own time. 

When “confronted with obscurantism with a scientific face,” one should recall “two things.” First, “viruses are dumb; they are blind; they are not here to tell us their stories or to relay the stories of humanity’s bad shepherds”; hence “there is no ‘good use,’ no ‘societal lesson,’ no last judgment’ to be expected from a pandemic.” Second, medical questions and their implications for policy are “much murkier than we have been led to believe over the past few months.” Such questions and implications necessarily address not only the body but the human soul. And we are no longer so adept at considering matters of the soul as we once were.

For example, those who have welcomed the peace and quiet of pandemic life will quote Pascal: “All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room.” Yes, but for Pascal quietude “was not an indulgence but a struggle.” Hobbies and yoga sessions were not what he had in mind. Following Paul the Apostle, Pascal said, “The self is hateful,” no many how many times one may chant ‘OM’ in search of serenity. Navel-gazing complacency is “indecent in the extreme,” insulting “to those who did not have a home to stay in” and affirming no real spiritual insights but instead orchestrating “a philharmonic of trivialities, minor pleasures, and drumrolls of well-tempered narcissism.” Such a pseudo-spiritual of epicureanism “flew in the face of Greek wisdom, which, from Aristotle on, held that man was a political animal.” It ignored that decidedly introverted ‘modern,’ René Descartes, who touched base with the moment of his cogito ergo sum only in order to fortify the “zest for the sciences, for medicine, for ethics… for intellectual speculation, for friendship, and for the world.” And it dismissed the ‘postmodern’ Edmund Husserl, who insisted that “consciousness is always conscious of something, that existence is rooted in intentionality, and that what is interesting about a given subject is not what he is but what he does and, in doing what he does, how he inhabits the world, shapes it, takes from it, and gives to it.” ‘Social distancing’? “Shaking hands was a fine gesture of civility,” a “sign of republican solidarity promoted by the American Revolution, the spirit of democracy,” and even the “peace-loving Quakers,” whom George Washington deemed useful American citizens, even if they refused to defend the republic in war. 

Neither genuinely philosophic nor genuinely political, our quietists fare no better under the gaze informed by Scripture. “Prophecy is inherently an act of exposure to another intelligence, and even a radically different one, since it is God’s.” The prophet “step[s] outside” of himself. He calls his people to do the same, to leave the comfortable servility of Egypt, to risk everything in a land God has promised for them. The example of prophecy has marked Jews ever since. “A liberal, universalist, humanist Jew” will “experience confinement with oneself only as a regrettably temporary state, one that, if it were to endure, would be starkly contrary to his vocation, which is to move toward his fellow men.” The Orthodox Jew, for his part, must “acquire a master, because there is no shaping of the self without a searing exposure to one who knows more than you”; “study is done in pairs, as philosophy was for Plato.” Torah study is war, and war is more than a tempest in the teapot of the ‘self.’ Contra Sartre, “hell is not other people, but the self,” confined as it is in its resentments, its envies, its sour isolation. The Muharal of Prague went even further, teaching that “hell is the body,” a trap for the spirit longing for freedom, a thing of “opaque matter” under “the sway of medical power.” On that note of Jewish neo-Platonism, Lévy deplores the oversight of the French, who took to hoarding food when news of the pandemic first appeared. “Few seemed shocked, at least in France, that books were not considered basic necessities,” that bodily nourishment seemed more important to a republican citizenry than “nourishment for the mind and the soul.”

The closing of churches and synagogues, museums and parks “and other sites of lay meditation in which humanity satisfies its uncountable noncommercializable spiritual needs” followed from the same mindset. “The sight of a sovereign Pope, heir to John Paul II’s ‘Be not afraid’ and a veteran practitioner of the eminently Catholic ritual of the blessing of the sick and afflicted in the slums of Buenos Aires, distancing himself from the flock, communicating only through the internet ordering that fonts of holy water be emptied, and performing the stations of the cross in the courtyard of the basilica facing an empty St. Peter’s Square” erased “the Jewish image of the Messiah waiting among the scrofulous beggars outside the gates of Rome” and forgets “Jesus’s healing of the leper.” Charles de Gaulle proved himself a better Catholic than the pope when visiting Tahiti in 1956, two years before assuming the presidency of the republic. Lévy remembers a news clip he saw as a child: De Gaulle’s “limousine is blocked by a procession of lepers. He gets out, shakes their hands, holds a child in his arms, hugs the organizer of the strange demonstration, says nothing, and continues on his way.”

Not only has the response of governments to the virus further abridged citizens’ liberty by collecting still more personal data “that everyone knows can be put to bad uses,” but “living in a perpetual state of alert and suspicion” undermines trust among those citizens, the trust that enables them to associate with one another, to resist government encroachments, to sustain republican regimes. This is “a life terrified of itself, gone to ground in its Kafkaesque burrow, which has become a penal colony,” a life “in which one accepts, with enthusiasm or resignation the transformation of the welfare state into the surveillance state,” already far advanced in communist China, with Europe not too far behind. “Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract is being slowly but surely replaced by a life contract inspired by Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism and the ‘panopticon’ of the surveillance state.” This can only cause “a profound break… with all the wisdom of the world, notably but by no means exclusively Jewish,” which says “that a life is not a life if it is merely life.” Books are basic necessities, and the Book of Books joins with the books of the philosophers in telling us “that humanity is never identity in and for itself, never reducible to itself,” but thrives “only if…it leaves the confinement that is life in its native state.” In Biblical terms, to bow down before the virus is idolatry, worship of the Baal of the twenty-first century. Under that dispensation, the lion will indeed lie down with the lamb—on “an animal farm” ruled by tyrants underneath the figurehead king of terrors, the newly-crowned virus.

Idolatry means worship of man-made things. “Ironclad egoism” undergirds “COVID-inspired moralism.” Even the Left, perhaps especially the Left, should understand that the policies in place in most countries hardly conduce to greater civil-social and political equality. The Islamic State, Erdogan of Turkey, Putin of Russia, Xi Jinping of China all have taken the distraction caused by the virus as an opportunity to enhance their own powers at home and abroad. America withdraws from the world, leaving it to the likes of them. The enemies of the United States, “which are the enemies of freedom, are crashing through the world as if America no longer counts for anything, carries no weight, no longer exists.” Without the United States, “the globalization of the twenty-first century will be Chinese or will not happen at all.” 

Against that harsh prospect, Lévy looks not to Karl Marx or Carl Schmitt but to the “somber but committed souls who had fought the beast with bare hands” in the Spanish Civil War—the American Ernest Hemingway, France’s André Malraux. “They were, in our eyes, the most admirable of men because they were both present in the world and present in words, combining the art of the fighter with that of the poet.” They “gave us the weapons and the tools not to remake [the world], but to repair it,” resisting “the twin villainy of accepting the status quo and pretending to ‘cure’ it.” “It was under their hand that we went to Biafra, to the Vietnamese boat people, to Bangladesh”—as Malraux himself had wanted to do, at the end of his life. 

Lévy is right to take the engagé intellectuals of the 1930s and 1940s as his forebears. Neither quite a philosopher nor quite a Talmudist, he is nonetheless a real ‘intellectual,’ familiar to Americans since Ralph Waldo Emerson, to the British since Thomas Carlyle—a lay preacher, a rhetorician who does not aim merely at self-aggrandizement, smart enough but too honorable for sophistry, although primed for oratorical exaggeration when hammering a point home. Unlike so many among his contemporaries, he has never been gulled by ideology—the characteristic deformation professionelle of his kind. He artfully both courts and resists chattering-class fashions, while in the end standing firmly for the rights inherent in human beings, rights we owe (to give it an old-fashioned formulation) to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.